{"id":924,"date":"2014-01-16T20:57:08","date_gmt":"2014-01-16T20:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/?p=924"},"modified":"2014-01-16T20:57:08","modified_gmt":"2014-01-16T20:57:08","slug":"924","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/?p=924","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote this almost a decade ago when walking with dona on the streets of San Francisco; today I learned that John Dobson is dead. I remember you, john; RIP. The original link to his personal site no longer works… replaced with a wiki entry ;( This happened with a waxing moon about 88% full, according to the net….<\/p>\n

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Last night dona and I were walking along and there was this slighly crazy looking guy (in that slightly crazy looking guy way that half the people in SF have) with what looked like a mortar or some kind of rocket thingee on the corner of 9th and irving; we almost passed by when I heard him say something about the moon and dona convinced me to go back and take a look.<\/p>\n

Turns out that this was john dobson. Now, for those of you who don’t know telescopes, john dobson is an icon; he figured out how to make telescopes from basically refuse – cast-off lumber, bits of wire and iron, bottoms of large glass jugs – or, in this case, I heard him say something about a ship’s porthole glass. There is a major line of telescopes called Dobsonian that are very popular today and named after him.<\/p>\n

I looked through his thoroughly battered scope (a 9.5″-er, about 4′ long; again, for those who don’t know scopes, this is a more than respectable piece) and saw the moon like I don’t ever remember seeing it; it was a real thrill to meet him and look through the lens. It also turns out he’s about 90 years old (looks a good 15-20 years younger) and still does the sidewalk astronomy thing… just showing people the wonders of the universe.<\/p>\n

His story is remarkable; born in china in 1915 he was a vedantic monk for 23 years before being thrown out for spending too much time outside the monastery showing people who to build telescopes and such – here’s a brief bio:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Dobson_(amateur_astronomer)<\/p>\n

To run across such a remarkable man on the streets on a random night is just another reason to love this city.<\/p>\n

May you live in interesting times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote this almost a decade ago when walking with dona on the streets of San Francisco; today I learned that John Dobson is dead. I remember you, john; RIP. The original link to his personal site no longer works… replaced with a wiki entry ;( This happened with a waxing moon about 88% full, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,16,18,6],"tags":[247,246,248,245,26],"class_list":["post-924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-me","category-people","category-rememberance","category-tech","tag-dobson","tag-john-dobson","tag-memories","tag-moon","tag-rip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=924"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":935,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924\/revisions\/935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}