John Dobson (astronomer)

John Dobson
John Dobson in 2002.
Born	John Lowry Dobson (1915-09-14)September 14, 1915 Beijing, China
Died	January 15, 2014(2014-01-15) (aged 98) Burbank, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Vedantan monk (1944−1967), lecturer/popularizer of amateur astronomy
Known for	Dobsonian telescope, sidewalk astronomy

John Lowry Dobson (September 14, 1915 – January 15, 2014) was an amateur astronomer and is best known for the Dobsonian telescope, a portable, low-cost Newtonian reflector telescope. He was less known for his efforts to promote awareness of astronomy (and his unorthodox views of physical cosmology) through public lectures including his performances of "sidewalk astronomy." John Dobson was also the co-founder of the amateur astronomical group, the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers.

John Dobson was born in Beijing, China. His maternal grandfather founded Peking University, his mother was a musician, and his father taught zoology at the University. He and his parents moved to San Francisco, California in 1927. His father accepted a teaching position at Lowell High School and taught there until the 1950s. Dobson spent 23 years in a monastery, after which he became more active in promoting astronomy.

As a teen John Dobson became a “belligerent” atheist. He said: “I could see that these two notions cannot arise in the same being: ‘do unto others as you would that they do unto’ and ‘if you're not a good boy, it's into hell for keeps.’... They must be spoofing us. So I became an atheist, a belligerent atheist. If anybody started a conversation about the subject, I was a belligerent atheist.”

Over time Dobson became interested in the universe and its workings. He earned a masters degree in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1943, working in E. O. Lawrence's lab. In 1944 he attended a lecture by a Vedantan swami. Dobson said the swami “revealed to him a world he had never seen.” That same year Dobson joined the Vedanta Society monastery in San Francisco, becoming a monk of the Ramakrishna Order. “One of John's responsibilities at the monastery was to reconcile astronomy with the teachings of Vedanta. That job led him to build telescopes on the side. He took to wheeling them around outside the monastery, fascinating the neighbors who would congregate around him.”