The monastery disagreed. Dobson kept building anyway, grinding mirrors underwater to muffle the sound and making mounts from discarded hose reels and scrap wood He bolted wagon wheels onto his telescopes and rolled them through the neighborhood, showing the sky to kids and adults. In 1967, after 23 years, the monastery asked him to leave. He was spending too many nights out with the neighbors and the telescopes.
So Dobson hitchhiked to San Francisco and set up his scopes at the corner of Broderick and Jackson every clear night. Thousands of people looked while he explained what they were seeing. In 1968, he and the young folks who had built telescopes under his guidance founded the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers, a club with no research and no formal meetings. Its sole purpose was to share the sky with the public.
His scrap-wood mount, now called the Dobsonian, made big telescopes cheap enough for anyone, and he refused to patent it. “It's like re-inventing a cup,” he said. “We've had cups all along, and if you try to patent a cup with a handle, you can't.” Millions of people have now looked through Sidewalk Astronomers' telescopes, on street corners and in national parks, wherever, as the club puts it, dark skies and the public collide.
One rule of Dobson's still defines the practice: the person at the telescope talks. You don't just serve up the view, you tell folks what they're looking at. The eyepiece starts more conversations between strangers than anything else you can put on a sidewalk.
Sources
Bio: John Dobson — A Sidewalk Astronomer, telescopepictures.com.
Amateur Astronomer and Telescope Inventor John Dobson Dies at 98 — KQED, January 2014.
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