Community leader, wife of astronomer, Tombaugh dies at 99

Patricia "Patsy" Edson Tombaugh, community leader, educator, artist, and enthusiastic supporter of her astronomy pioneer husband Clyde, discover of the planet Pluto, died Thursday at the Arbors of Del Rey in Las Cruces. She was 99. "Mother was born Nov. 7, 1912, and hoped to enjoy celebrating her 100th birthday with New Mexico's Centennial this year, but her body just gave out," said her daughter Annette Tombaugh Sitze of Las Cruces. She was in Florida for the 2006 launch of the New Horizons Pluto Probe, which carried Clyde's ashes, and expressed hopes to live to see it reach Pluto in 2015. She met Clyde Tombaugh shortly after his 1930 discovery of Pluto, when he entered Kansas University as a freshman in 1932, and stayed at her mother's rooming house. They were married in 1934 and had two children, Annette and Alden, both Las Cruces residents. Known for her sense of humor, she once joked that "Pluto was his first love" and she had to compete with several planets, comets and assorted other heavenly bodies to attract his attention. But it was clear, through their six-decade marriage that she was the love of his life, and it was her connections that steered the course of his life after his early astronomical coup. "My uncle, James Edson, my mother's brother, introduced them and it was my uncle, who also brought Werner von Braun here, who was responsible for bringing them to Las Cruces in 1946," Sitze said...more