John Dobson, Sidewalk Astronomers founder, dies

Amateur astronomer John Dobson founded the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers, which branched out worldwide. Amateur astronomer John Dobson founded the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers, which branched out worldwide. Photo: David Paul Morris, The Chronicle Photo: David Paul Morris, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close John Dobson, Sidewalk Astronomers founder, dies 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

(02-03) 10:36 PST SAN FRANCISCO --

John Dobson, a former monk, trundled his homemade telescope on wheels around San Francisco streets for decades, inviting nighttime strollers to look at the skies.

"Care to see the moon?" he'd call out. "Want to look at Saturn?"

He was a tireless missionary for the cosmos, an astronomy teacher to a worldwide public, and an expert at showing others how to make his powerful "Dobsonian" telescopes.

Mr. Dobson died Jan. 15 at the age of 98 at a medical center in Burbank. An announcement of his death from the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers said he had suffered a stroke and never fully recovered.

Tall, lanky, white-haired, pony-tailed and endlessly enthusiastic in his books and public talks, "Telescope John" probably did more than most professionals to inspire the public's interest in the moon, the planets and the constellations.

Like some cosmological Pied Piper, Mr. Dobson founded a group of amateurs called the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers, which branched out to number thousands of members at chapters around the world. They followed his lead and with their own handmade telescopes - or with store-bought ones - invited people at street corners, in parks and in front of bookstores to join them for star parties on clear evenings.

Simple lifestyle

Mr. Dobson never had a steady income. He charged no fees for teaching adults and children the fine art of telescope making, and lived on infrequent royalties from his books. He slept in the homes of friends and used their basements to store surplus portholes for grinding telescope mirrors, and surplus cardboard forms for making telescope tubes.

His manner was brusque, and he tolerated no opposition to his views on cosmology - opposing the prevalent Big Bang theory because, he insisted, the universe could not possibly have had a beginning. He once appeared on Johnny Carson's "Tonight" show, where he wowed the audience and Carson.

Although he invented his own simple "Dobsonian" telescope, he never sought a patent for it nor copyrighted the name because, he said, he wanted the design to circulate as widely as possible. Commercial kits for building his telescopes are now widely manufactured and sold, but he never received a royalty from them.

John Lowry Dobson was born in 1915 in Beijing, where his parents were missionaries and teachers. The family moved to San Francisco in 1927 to flee China's political unrest, and Mr. Dobson attended public scho0ls here. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1943, with a master's degree in chemistry.

Although he was a committed atheist, he studied Eastern religions and joined the Vedanta society's monastery in San Francisco, where he was assigned to care for the flowers in the garden. Instead, he built his first telescope. "Everybody ought to see this," he exclaimed after his first look at the edge of the three-quarter moon's features.

Expulsion

Transferred to the Vedanta monastery in Sacramento, he pondered the links between science and religion, and taught neighbors to make telescopes. He spent so much time doing that that the abbott expelled him from the order in 1967.

After hitchhiking to San Francisco and building more telescopes, he toured the West Coast in a rickety old bus, lecturing on astronomy at random street corners and helping others make their own "Dobsonians."

In San Francisco, on one winter night in 1968, a Chronicle reporter saw Mr. Dobson and his telescope standing on a Pacific Heights street corner with a cluster of children who were taking turns to look at Saturn.

A police car showed up, and the officers asked the reporter: "What's this contraption and who is this guy? A lady's just called and said there's a strange man hanging around, and he's attracting some children."

It's his telescope and he's showing the kids a planet, the reporter answered.

"Want to look at the sky too?" Mr. Dobson asked the cops. "It's Saturn."

The officers paused for a moment and did. "Wow!" they said. They thanked Mr. Dobson and drove off. They filed no report.

"John had a totally engaging and captivating way of talking that meshed the joys of telescope making with the joys of discovering about the universe," said Allan Gould, an astronomer with UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science.

Andrew Fraknoi, chairman of the astronomy department at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, admired Mr. Dobson's passion.

"While I didn't agree with everything he taught, I thought his love of sharing astronomy, his inventive telescope design, and his passion for teaching were a wonderful gift to the Bay Area and the nation," he said.