Percival Lowell - Astronomy Career

Astronomy Career

Lowell became determined to study Mars and astronomy as a full-time career after reading Camille Flammarion's La planète Mars. He was particularly interested in the canals of Mars, as drawn by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who was director of the Milan Observatory.

In 1894 Lowell chose Flagstaff, Arizona Territory as the home of his new observatory. At an altitude of over 2100 meters (7000 feet), with few cloudy nights, and far from city lights, Flagstaff was an excellent site for astronomical observations. This marked the first time an observatory had been deliberately located in a remote, elevated place for optimal seeing.

For the next fifteen years he studied Mars extensively, and made intricate drawings of the surface markings as he perceived them. Lowell published his views in three books: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908). With these writings, Lowell more than anyone else popularized the long-held belief that these markings showed that Mars sustained intelligent life forms.

His works include a detailed description of what he termed the 'non-natural features' of the planet's surface, including especially a full account of the 'canals,' single and double; the 'oases,' as he termed the dark spots at their intersections; and the varying visibility of both, depending partly on the Martian seasons. He theorized that an advanced but desperate culture had built the canals to tap Mars' polar ice caps, the last source of water on an inexorably drying planet.

While this idea excited the public, the astronomical community was skeptical. Many astronomers could not see these markings, and few believed that they were as extensive as Lowell claimed. As a result, Lowell and his observatory were largely ostracized. Although the consensus was that some actual features did exist which would account for these markings, in 1909 the sixty-inch Mount Wilson Observatory telescope in Southern California allowed closer observation of the structures Lowell had interpreted as canals, and revealed irregular geological features, probably the result of natural erosion.

The existence of canal-like features would not be definitively disproved until Mariner 4 took the first close-up pictures of Mars in 1965, and Mariner 9 orbited and mapped the planet in 1972. Today, the surface markings taken to be canals are regarded as an optical illusion.

Although Lowell was better known for his observations of Mars, he also drew maps of the planet Venus. Lowell observed spoke-like features and a central dark spot, yet it is now known that Venus' atmosphere is opaque. In an article published in Sky and Telescope in July 2003, it was suggested that in fact Lowell was observing an image of the blood vessels in his own eye.