![]() ![]() A few holdouts had it right - in fact, older estimates were closer to the correct value of about 8,000 parsecs. The discussion is fascinating in part because some if it is wrong: for example, studies at the time suggested that the Sun lies 10,000 parsecs (32,000 light-years) from the galactic center. Bok explained in July 1963 (back when Sky & Telescope subscriptions cost just $5 a year!) how radio and optical astronomers were working closely to understand the Milky Way’s spiral structure and the Sun’s place in it. The direct service of the Moon’s light in illuminating the harvest fields, countryside, and polar nights.” Service of the phases as a lunar calendar. ![]() The amusingly practical values of moonlight ( S&T: Nov.Here are some examples from recent perusings: But sometimes I just type in a word or two, such as “black holes,” and see what comes up. I’m usually looking for something specific: a Questar ad from the 1950s or what astronomers were saying about Hubble just before it launched. And this weekend only, get $25 off.Ībout once a week, I pop a disk from the Sky & Telescope Seven-Decade Collection into my laptop. “There’s one thing nice about sleeping in a telescope,” he told the Ventura County Star in 2007.The digital archive of Sky & Telescope magazine is an essential resource for astronomers at any level. Used to the most Spartan accommodations, he was known to sleep inside the scope’s cylindrical tubes when he was on the road. In his 90s, Dobson was still a gypsy proselytizer for astronomy, lecturing and giving workshops as far away as Russia and China. He is survived by a son, Loren, of Sacramento. His life was chronicled in films, including the 2005 documentary “A Sidewalk Astronomer,” directed by Jeffrey Fox Jacobs. He lived at the Vedanta center in the Hollywood Hills, often hiking to Griffith Observatory, where he led public events such as a 12-hour telescope-building marathon in the mid-1980s. In 1978 Dobson was invited to give a series of lectures at the Vedanta Society of Southern California and began to spend part of each year in Los Angeles. With chapters across the country and abroad, Sidewalk Astronomers now has upward of 10,000 members, said Director Donna Smith. Soon, he was barnstorming the country, setting up his scopes in shopping center parking lots and national parks - anyplace, he said, “where dark skies and the public collide.” In 1968, he formed the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers with Bruce Sams and Jeffrey Roloff, who had built telescopes under his tutelage. “If the sun were the size of a basketball,” he often said, “Jupiter would be the size of a grape, and the Earth would be the size of a very small grape seed.” “Come see the sun!” he shouted, sometimes while twirling a lariat.īrusque and witty, he explained the cosmos in easily understood terms. With the air of a carnival barker, he enticed passersby to look deeply into the heavens. He hitchhiked to San Francisco, where he began teaching and setting up his telescopes on street corners. According to his biography on the Sidewalk Astronomers website, he wasn’t neglecting his monastic duties that time but was weeding the lawn behind a monastery wall. That is what the other monks thought he was doing when they decided to expel him in 1967. He was often away from the monastery to help neighbors in the community construct their own scopes. Soon he took to stealth, smuggling parts into the monastery in fertilizer boxes after his superiors told him his activities were inappropriate for a monk. Transferred in 1958 to the order’s Sacramento monastery, he began building telescopes in earnest. When he was done, he peered at the moon and was profoundly moved. He scavenged for materials, including a 12-inch porthole glass from a marine salvage yard that he sanded into a telescope mirror. That assignment led him to build his first telescope, in 1956. In 1944 he joined the Vedanta Monastery in San Francisco, where he was asked to reconcile the order’s teachings with science. He earned a degree in chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1943 and went to work in the defense field.Īn atheist since high school, he began to study Eastern religions after attending a lecture by Swami Ashokananda of the Vedanta Society. Nervous about political unrest in China, his family relocated to San Francisco in 1927. His mother was a musician and his father taught zoology at Peking University. Although the steady-state theory has been widely discredited, Dobson was an unwavering supporter, which caused many in the astronomy establishment to dismiss him.ĭobson was born Sept. ![]()
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