Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, May 1, 2006 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

John Dobson

"Astronomy for the People"

ABSTRACT -- In the early 1950s, John Dobson spied a 12-inch piece of porthole glass on a friend’s table and realized that it could be polished by hand into a telescope mirror. As an ascetic monk with no money, he was forced to scrounge for materials, cobbling together the mount from such humble objects as a plywood box, the cardboard cores of garden hose reels, and roof shingles. He then pointed his homemade contraption at the moon and was astonished by how much detail he could see. Craters, mountains and valleys leapt into view. "It was like I was coming in for a landing," he says.

Dobson continued to refine his basic telescope designs, leading in time to the affordable mount for Newtonian reflectors that would be called the ‘Dobsonian’ and become one of the best selling telescope mounts in the world. Mr. Dobson then started lending telescopes to kids who'd see him stargazing on the streets of San Francisco, and would teach them to make their own. Eventually his prolonged absences led to his dismissal from the monastery, but within a few months , in 1968, he co-founded the Sidewalk Astronomers, headquartered in a retired San Francisco school bus. The bus made hundreds of trips around California for telescope viewing during evening star parties. Now the Sidewalk Astronomers organization has two-dozen chapters throughout the world including places like São Paulo, Liverpool, Moscow and British Columbia.

In this talk, Mr. Dobson will discuss the history and engineering that went into creating what eventually became affordable commercial telescope mounts and discuss other thoughts related to current amateur astronomy.

Abstract from "The Father of Street-Corner Stargazing," Brett Campbell, Wall street Journal, September 1, 2004.

SPEAKER -- BIO: Mr. Dobson was born in Peking (Beijing), China, on September 14, 1915. In 1927, his parents moved the family to San Francisco due to the political and social unrest in China. Mr. Dobson completed a degree in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1943 and then took defense-related jobs which he held until he joined the Vedanta Monastery in San Francisco in 1944 . He spent the next 23 years in the Monastery as a monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He later dedicated his life to public service, founding the Sidewalk Astronomers Club and becoming an outspoken advocate for amateur astronomy. He has appeared on "The Tonight Show," PBS, and dozens of radio programs. A movie on his life has just been released which chronicles his unusual and eclectic rise to legendary status in the world of amateur astronomy.