My heart is so heavy right now...John Dobson never got the full measure of recognition he deserves. I'm a lawyer and I bought a telescope. THAT is what John Dobson made me do, as I'm sure he made countless others do too. God bless and rest you in peace, John....
I am about to submit a paper on the gap between general relativity and quantum mechanics based on John Dobson’s work that should completely upset science
How the hell is that scope staying centered on anything without moving? Because it looks like they were using some higher magnification since he was pointing it at craters to show that equatorial nerd smarting off.
@@kishascape He probably just moves it often. I've looked at the Moon under >200x magnification when seeing conditions permit and I find myself having to move it every few seconds to stay on target and that's with an 82 degree AFOV.
He was a humble man he gave many people a wow moment. Now Even Astronomers use the term I am going to buy or use a Dobsonian his mout has now been used as a term to describe a Newtonian telescope! he has a legacy
Imagine the number of people who got into astronomy who otherwise would have just walked on. He is so passionate about it that he is putting up a telescope for others to see at free of cost.
Wow, I just thought of revisiting this video clip two years from the last time I viewed it...and instantly I'm reminded that my heart is STILL heavy again. I sure miss the old man John Dobson. Respct. Nothing else to say.
Great man, inspirerer and teacher. We need more people like John, the world needs this! Now he is watching to us from the stars and planets in a galaxy far far away. I have a 127mm refractor, descent instrument but my next purchase will be a Dobson 300mm. The little time on Earth that is given to us, use it well my friends.....use it well! Space, the final frontier......these are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.
I had the privilege of seeing him speak on two different occasions. I also built a telescope based on his design. John's mission was to share his telescope with the public but more importantly show them how they can make their own telescope so that they can share as well.
Awesome that he created this telescope design! Although he kind of sounds kind a like a wacky crazy man, he has a wry sense of humor that not everyone appreciates.
This video right here was the catalyst to me starting a local astronomy club. We set up on the sidewalk just like John and hold public outreach with our telescopes, showing the public something they've never seen before.
My wife and I have an 8-inch Celestron that we put out on the patio when we want to star gaze - the lines in the concrete line up exactly north/south, so setting it up is as simple as that. One night, years ago, we had our 7 y-o granddaughter staying and she wanted to look at the Moon for the first time. She stood on a box, looking into the eyepiece, and looked, and looked... Finally, she said, "It's like ground! It's got holes in it." Dinner went into the warming tray while she watched the Moon, until it finally went behind the house roof. So we shifted the view to Alpha Centauri and she looked into the eyepiece, then pulled back and looked up at the star, then back to the eyepiece. "There's two!" So we told her about Alpha Centauri being a double star. A couple of years later, she was here when Jupiter was overhead so we set up the telescope again and left it tracking the planet so that, during the night, we could follow the movement of the Galilaean moons. She thought that was pretty cool, too. In another lifetime, I did public nights at an observatory and the visitors whom I appreciated most were the children. Some of their questions really got me thinking and, more than once, I had to use the emergency back-up answer, "I don't know." Many of the people who stopped to look through John Dobson's sidewalk telescope would remember that moment forever.
Bill, sorry to see that no one has responded to your question, as I'm just finding it here this morning, since you asked a year ago. This is a small excerpt that was taken from a larger film work that you can look up, and the entire 75 minute filmwork produced by a New York filmmaker,Jeffrey Fox Jacobs was produced / copyrighted in 2005. The Sidewalk Astronomer. amateur astronomers know Dobson's name quite well across the world for over a half-century. It's difficult to go into a bookstore anywhere in the world, access the physics and astronomy books section of the store, and John Dobson's name is commonly seen in the index or chapters of the book regarding telescopes or telescope building designs. I would attach a picture of the back of the DVD video film disc box, which you can easily look up the film title can a Google search. I believe the famous large IMDb Internet Movie database has a write-up on the description of the film. I don't want to ramble on too long here this morning, but I've worked with John Dobson over the years, before he passed away at age 98 in February of 2014 in Los Angeles. Dobson I've been working as the gardener at a monastery in Sacramento and San Francisco California since the 1950s. He initially came from work during the atom bomb project in World War II, as he was employed at the Berkeley California radiation lab as a chemist. He lost his residents with the monastery by the mid-1960s and found himself homeless to sleep on a friend's apartment floor. he soon started the San Francisco sidewalk astronomers club, we continued to build the telescopes taking them out to the Streets of San Francisco for the public to observe through. you might also find another film produced by PBS, that was aired Across America in the early 1990s - The Astronomers Part 1 ~ 6. the first hour-long part is also available in RU-vid, if you Google search John Dobson the astronomers where is the rest of the universe? Part 1. this is all so fascinating to watch as it's a beautifully narrated six-part special. PBS shows to show John Dobson in the opening seconds on a street in San Francisco but he has featured throughout that first part several times in the next hour showing his telescope building class at the San Francisco Science Museum and also conducting sidewalk astronomy in Crater Lake Oregon National Park. *Also if you can find a used bookstore or magazine shop and locate the April 1989 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, there is a beautiful 11-page story that the magazine's editor in chief, Don Mosier, produced about John Dobson. I went through a similar process of losing the home I designed and built in 2008, after 20 years of designing building and maintaining it for my wife and daughter and I, East of Portland Oregon in the suburban city of Troutdale in the Columbia River Gorge. before I lost the home I first lost a 30-year job in the computer industry, in 2000, as I still had the home, I locked it up and took off for a 10000 mile road trip across America with my astronomy clubs h-alpha filtered solar telescope. I allowed thousands of people to observe the sun through the solar telescope. I put together a 15-minute excerpts of audio recordings I had of over a hundred hours of audio recordings total, into a RU-vid constructed video, [in my Mark Seibold RU-vid channel] with a slideshow showing on location places where I provided this Across America and into Eastern Canada, for a 6 week solo road trip as I was invited to stay with many people along the way. Although what you see John Dobson doing here in the street with one of his home-built telescopes or possibly a similar telescope that his students build during his classes that he holds around the world, has been accomplished by many other amateur astronomers over the years, or large astronomy clubs, either at science museums, colleges and universities,within every major city of the world, will provide sidewalk astronomy star parties, such as seen in this short 7 minute and 21 second excerpt, it is rarely seen accomplished by one individual standing alone with a large reflector telescope. I've personally provided this for over twenty thousand hours over the past two decades here in my hometown of Portland Oregon, and across the nation on long solo road trips, and overseas in the South Pacific Fiji Islands, where my second wife was from originally. Dobson came to stay on one of his telescope building class ventures at an Astronomy Store about 15 miles north of Portland Oregon in the early part of the years of 2003 and 2004. While I worked at The astronomy store I also chauffeured John Dobson to several schools in the area to have him lecture to young students, and he and I provided sidewalk astronomy across Portland Oregon on some evenings, and during the day to provide safe solar observing through special solar filtered telescopes, for the public, at many outdoor venues such as coffee houses, and downtown Portland sidewalks. You can access my name through my Facebook site, as I have over 200 albums displaying much of my life in astronomy, and related art and photography. One such album titled - Mark Seibold Provides Sidewalk Astronomy for Over 20 Years, displays many photos taken with the public, and yet the only photo I have of John and I standing on the sidewalk together in front of Portland State University campus, with their chair of the physics department and students, as we provided solar sidewalk astronomy for their physics students one day in the late Spring of 2004. Another FB album titled- Mark Seibold Provides Regular Star Parties on Mount Tabor and Mount Scott, shows hundreds of photos of the publican I observing through my 10.1 inch Dobsonian telescope, and a smaller Celestron computerized Cassegrain telescope. My technical astronomy art has been featured in NASA websites for over a decade and I've also spoken about this on National public Radio's Talk of the Nation program during the last 7 years it was on air broadcast 2005 ~ 2013 across America on affiliate NPR stations. There is also a FB album titled - Mark Seibold Speaks Many times on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, [with all of the listed programs addresses over the dozen and a half times I spoke on NPR, as a call-in. Occasionally the discussion show's host, Neal Conan, put me ahead of the scheduled guests to speak first.
@@billgreen4017 Yes, Feel free to contact me at my email markscosmiclight@gmail.com, or my other contacts such as cellphone are within Facebook About info. Can you just elaborate a little more in this thread as to what exactly you are documenting? Will it be a video-or filmwork? An interview? You can also click onto my profile, see under the image, a caption, there is a link to a RU-vid displayed 30 minute interview conducted here near my home town of Portland, at the capital city of Salem Oregon, in a cable TV channel studio. This was a simple 30 minutes of general astronomy, including touching briefly on the life of astronomy, photography, and especially my artwork seen in NASA websites for over a decade now. I have spread myself thin, and also acted as a background actor on Hollywood movie sets for over 20 years. I spoke many times on NPR's Talk of the Nation, [not an invited guest but as a call-in, as I held the record for calling into that discussion program for the last 7 years that it was on air, every weekday for two hours from Washington DC. I apologize if I mentioned all this already earlier.
"Your shortcuts...can hardly lead to satisfactory instruments of the kind most amateurs want in these large sizes. Porthole glass, makeshift altazimuth mountings, 'light bulb' test methods...are no longer suitable...this may have been all right 20 0r 30 years ago...In any event, we would not want to publish your material." Sky & Telescope astronomy magazine editor in 1969, replying to John Dobson's proposal that the magazine publish his then-new design. That editor got it seriously wrong; Dobsonian mount telescopes are now used by amateur astronomers all over the world - many of the telescopes being made by those amateurs.
