| Subject: Re: Sidewalk astronomer - John Dobson |
Author:
Boyd Percy
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Date Posted: 15:08:57 01/25/14 Sat
In reply to:
Jon
's message, "Sidewalk astronomer - John Dobson" on 23:45:37 01/24/14 Fri
>In "Rocinante" Mark & Jackie Gravengood meet Dobson at
>the Texas Star Party.
>
>Randy Cassingham’s Honorary Unsubscribe Recognizes the
>Unknown, the Forgotten and the Often Obscure People
>who Had an Impact on Our Lives
>
>link:
>href="http://www.honoraryunsubscribe.com/john_dobson.ht
>ml">http://www.honoraryunsubscribe.com/john_dobson.html
>
>
>Sidewalk astronomer
>John Dobson
>
>Born in China — his grandfather founded Peking
>University — the family fled political unrest in that
>country and settled in San Francisco, where Dobson
>couldn’t reconcile his personal philosophy. “I could
>see that these two notions cannot arise in the same
>being: ‘do unto others as you would that they do unto’
>and ‘if you're not a good boy, it’s into hell for
>keeps.’ They must be spoofing us,” he said years
>later. “So I became an atheist — a belligerent
>atheist.” But after earning his Master’s degree in
>chemistry, he became a monk — following Ramakrishna, a
>Vedantan Indian who had also studied Islam and
>Christianity and declared that all religions led to
>the same God. With his science background, the Order
>asked Dobson to reconcile its teachings with the
>advances in astronomy. To help with this task, he
>needed a telescope, which were too expensive for a
>monk to afford — so he designed his own. He called the
>result the “sidewalk telescope,” because he would set
>them up on sidewalks so that passersby could look
>through them and see the stars, nebulae, and other
>objects in the sky. Everyone else calls the design the
>Dobsonian Telescope, and it revolutionized astronomy,
>bringing tens of thousands of amateurs to the hobby.
>“He really wanted to just share viewing the sky with
>people,” says astronomer Anthony Cook of the Griffith
>Observatory in Los Angeles. “He created a hobby and a
>type of telescope that ensured that people could build
>their own and look farther across the universe than
>was possible for most people before his time.”
>
>The less costly design of Dobson’s telescope made it
>all possible. He started with a classic Newtonian
>design, and figured out where he could save money: the
>mirror, the tube, and the mount. He used a lighter
>mirror, which needed less expensive mounting hardware.
>His tube was plywood, or even cardboard. And the
>mount? “for hundreds of years, wars were fought using
>cannon on ‘Dobsonian’ mounts,” he once said.
>Manufacturers quickly adopted the design. A friend
>said he should patent his creation, but Dobson
>refused. “These are gifts to humanity,” he retorted,
>and even today the Dobsonian design is still “one of
>the most popular telescopes on the market,” according
>to Dennis di Cicco of Sky & Telescope magazine. But
>Dobson was thrown out of the monastery: ironically,
>they thought he spent too much time looking through
>his telescope, and helping others to build them. With
>his time freed up, he spent even more of his efforts
>into promoting astronomy, and explaining the cosmos to
>anyone and in any place — “where dark skies and the
>public collide,” he would say. He founded the Sidewalk
>Astronomers, which now has chapters around the world
>with around 10,000 members. A documentary of Dobson’s
>life, A Sidewalk Astronomer, was released in 2005. He
>had been in poor health after suffering a stroke
>several years ago, and died in Burbank, Calif., on
>January 15. He was 98.
>
>From This is True for 19 January 2014
Talk about a life well spent! I guess he was passionate about astronomy till the end.
Mark and Jackie's passion seems to have cooled a bit in "Starting Late" though they still use the observatory from time to time.
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