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On a San Francisco street, John Dobson conjures the wonders of the universe, inviting passersby to "Come see the moon." Most walk on, but those who take the time to stop and look are asto...
By RONNIE SCHEIB, for Variety
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n Dobson rents a modest basement apartment in the outer Sunset District, but he makes a point of telling a visitor that he doesn't live there; it's only a place to stay when the 89-year-o...
By John McMurtrie, for San Francisco Chronicle
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Maura Iano was strolling through the steamy streets of the West Village on Thursday night with her grandsons, Paul and Allen, when she stopped to gaze at a man on the sidewalk carefully a...
By COLIN MOYNIHAN, for New York Times
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Here's one for the scrapbook.
Yes I remember the young man. I wrote him back.
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John Dobson, itinerant telescope inventor, rogue cosmologist, onetime Vedanta Society monk and an unflagging inspiration to amateur astronomers around the world, is 90 years old and on th...
By David Perlman, for SF Gate
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By all appearances, 89-year-old John Dobson is unassuming. His
seemingly quiet demeanor and gray ponytail contrast with his life's
accomplishments, and at first glance, many people may ...
By Adriana M. Chavez, for The El Paso Times, Borderland Section
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OBSERVATIONAL COSMOLOGY
Can we, strictly on the basis of observation, and without the introduction of singularities, find a cosmological model capable of explaining the red shif...
By Ruth Ballard and John Dobson
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Eighty-five-year-old John Dobson, onetime Ramakrishna monk, off-beat cosmologist and Pied Piper of fledgling stargazers, has faced suspicious cops, cloudy nights, wind-swept hills and noi...
By David Perlman, for San Francisco Chronicle
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Years ago I asked John Dobson just how many people have looked through his telescope, he answered with a straight face "Over a million". I looked at him, and told him I did't believe him,...
By Mike Kendall, for Mike Kendall's old SA website
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John Dobson has been called the "Pied Piper of Astronomy," the "Star Monk," and the "MacGuyver of Astronomy." He is arguably one the most influential personalities in amateur astronomy in...
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While pulling out of my driveway on Tiburon Blvd. I saw Mt. Tamalpias as if it were a Hokusai wood block print. The shadows were perfect relief of what the Eclipse might reveal to me. Lo...
By Ken Frank
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THE OREGONIAN
TELESCOPIC VISIONARY
John Dobson fits right in at the church-turned-astronomy store.
With his white hair tied in a ponytail, the astronomical missionary is doing what h...
By Richard Hill, for THE OREGONIAN April 2, 2003
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From the NEW MEXICAN (Santa Fe)
Sunday, Oct 24, 2004
By Anne Constable, for New Mexican
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Copywrite 1995 Sky & Telescope MagazineOn a warm, spring day in 1974 I planned a visit to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. But I never made i...
By David Levy, for Sky Telescope Sept 1995
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Strutting around the lawn of the Vedanta monastery in Hollywood, California, John Dobson, cracks the whip on a rag-tag assembly of wannabe astronomers who are grinding their slabs of glas...
By Daniel Sordid, for space.com, May 5, 2000
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Date: July 31, 2004
Place: Peyton Room, Crater Lake Lodge, Crater Lake National Park
Interviewee: John Lowery Dobson, 88
Interviewer: F. Owen Hoffman
...
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The Father of Street-Corner Stargazing By BRETT CAMPBELL September 1, 2004; Page D10 Eugene, Ore
When he was a child growing up in Beijing, John Dobson used...
By Brett Campbell
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I named my trusty 12.5 inch f/5.75 Litebox travel telescope Strider years ago. Strider is the nickname of Aragorn, the 39th Heir of Isildur in the J. R. R Tolkein saga, Lord of the Rings....
By Jane Houston Jones
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"Come look at the moon!"
The frail gentleman with the white pony tail stands next to a small red tube that looks like a mortar or something dangerous. It's pointed at the moon. S...
By Morris Jones
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"The Red Chilena de AstronomiÂÂa" (RChA, Chilean Astronomy Network), an internet association of amateur astronomy groups in Chile, recently added a "Sidewalk Astronomy" section to their w...
By Eduardo UndaSanzana
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With respect to sidewalk astronomy in Chile, I founded our group here in Coyhaique six years ago and we have held many public observations and events. The observational conditions here ar...
By Francisco Mardones
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Nothing prepares you properly for your first look at or through a big telescope. We drove to Pasadena and up into the San Gabriel mountains during the January 2002 new moon weekend. Our d...
By Jane Houston Jones
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The Sidewalk Astronomers hosted the world premier showing of the documentary film "UNIVERSE - The Cosmology Quest" in Los Angeles on March 4, 2004. This ground-breaking and often controv...
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I took my finished telescope for a night out on the sidewalk last Friday. Mojo and Jane were setup when I got there so I dropped off my scope (which was tiny compared to theirs) and searc...
By John Foster
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Our History and Future
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Fasten your seat belt. You're going on a guided tour of a lunar day. We'll describe what lunar features can be seen during the phases of the moon. Use this diary all year to sketch the mo...
By Jane Houston Jones
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It took only a few nights of viewing the night skies thru a 4.25' aperture telescope to convince me that I need to see the universe with "bigger eyes"! After all , if you can see "that mu...
By Jeff Newsome
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Have telescope, will travel...is the battle cry of the Sidewalk Astronomers. We travel the highways and byways, the sidewalks and blacktops of the Bay Area , bringing our telescopes and a...
By Jane Houston Jones
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I am writing from Argentina to let you know that Mr. Dobson's efforts to make astronomy a subject for everyone are worthwhile. I am a math-science teacher and telescope maker (Dobson 16"...
By Jose Maria Palandri
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This is a most beautiful and important day! We have observed Venus. When I saw this small and black "drop" creeping in front of Sun, the bright giant, I was so inspired. We used 3 tele...
By Polina Siomina
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The weather in the morning of June 8th quite unexpectedly got cloudless, though granulation was seen only in some moments near the center of disc and steadiness was not excellent.
...
By Sergey Karpov
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After conferring, by phone, with Dave Thomson on the morning of Mon 29 Dec we decided to take the TROK 30 inch Dobsonian to Brenig Reservoir, in North Wales, that evening. This would be o...
By Dave Owen
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Every culture based its first religion on what its people saw in the night sky. There is something in the human psyche that cannot help but wonder at the stars, and which needs to impose ...
By Douglas Wolfe
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People are always looking for ways to be connected. Whether it be to a place, or to their family, we are ever in search of a common thread. You don't need to look that far. It's right abo...
By George Willis