Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Listening Once Again to Amateur Astronomy Pioneer John Dobson

Episode Date: January 7, 2013

A reprise of our very popular conversation with the delightful 97-year old John Dobson, inventor of the Dobsonian telescope that brings the universe within everyone’s reach.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A reprise of our visit with 97-year-old John Dobson, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It has been a good long while since we repeated an interview, but the holidays and a short vacation have brought that rare event around again. You'll hear brand new visits with Emily Lakdawalla, Bill Nye, and Bruce Betts. We've also brought back one of our most popular guests from all of 2012. If you missed John Dobson last September, you're in for a very special treat.

Of course, you lovers of the night sky know who John is. He invented the elegantly simple Dobson telescope that put the universe within almost everyone's reach. But there's much more to his delightful story. First, though, we'll hear from the equally delightful Planetary Society senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, it's my first chance to wish you a Happy New Year. Thanks. You too, Matt. We did do that little review last time we spoke of things coming up that you're looking forward to in 2013. But it turns out that now you have much more information about this mission to Mars, the first ever from India.

That's right. And the information was presented at a large science conference, actually the 100th annual of these Indian science conferences in Calcutta this week. They've selected five instruments for their payload. It's kind of a broad payload, really. There's a color camera. There's a thermal imaging spectrometer, much like Themis on Mars Odyssey. There's a methane sensor. There's a kind of energetic particle sort of thing. It's kind of like a one-from-every-column kind of instrument. The spacecraft's going to be in an orbit that is highly elliptical, even more elliptical than Mars expresses.

You know, it's not exactly the mission that one would have designed to do a first survey of Mars, but I think it's a good practice mission for the Indians, which I think is really what this mission is all about. It's really more about the engineering goals of launching a mission onto a Mars transfer trajectory, getting it there and operating it in Mars orbit, more that than it is about the science. Is there any overlap with these instruments with the U.S. mission that's going to also launch this year, MAVEN? Well, they state their science goal as being to study Mars's upper atmosphere, which is basically the overarching science goal of MAVEN.

And there is one instrument that's rather common between the two. But I think that MAVEN is definitely a much more specialized package, very narrowly focused on this question of the upper atmosphere and the gas loss to space. Whereas the Indian Mars mission is, it's quite a bit broader, but they will be able to provide valuable data from a different orbit bearing on the same questions. So five instruments, are these all homegrown? They are. Unlike Chandrayaan, which was their moon orbiter, all of the instruments for this mission are going to be made in India. And that's actually a major point of this mission. They're making a very big deal about this being an entirely indigenous mission. That's the word that they use. From the launch vehicle,

they're using their giant PSLV launch vehicle that's usually used to launch satellites into Earth orbit, obviously. They haven't used it very much for space trajectories. That launcher isn't actually capable of firing a spacecraft direct to Mars. So the spacecraft will launch in October and actually spend a month in Earth orbit, slowly boosting its orbit up and up to a more and more elliptical one until it can finally break away from Earth's gravity and get on its way to Mars.

And so the spacecraft's being built in India. It's got a lot of heritage from Chandrayaan. And all the instruments are being built in India. It's a completely homegrown mission. We will wish them the best of luck. There's plenty of room circling the red planet. There sure is. Thanks so much, Emily.

Talk to you next week. See you then, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our Planetary Evangelist and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. You can catch her all the time, of course, at planetary.org and in our Google Plus Hangouts that she alternates, hosting those with Casey Dreyer.

Up next is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill, I'm so glad that you and so many others have not yet tumbled over the fiscal cliff. Yes, it would have been catastrophic. And speaking of catastrophic, the fight about planetary science funding is still ahead, even though we avoided going over this cliff. Even if you don't live in the U.S., I imagine you heard about the financial situation in the United States where funding for everything was going to be cut off per this big threat that the U.S. Congress set up for itself.

And they reached a deal at the last minute. At least they put it off for a couple of months, most of it. But I say this all the time. People are complaining that it's no way to run a government. Maybe it is. That's why you have deadlines, Matt. Yeah. So you can meet them.

Deadlines are magic. Well, they certainly motivate people. And speaking of which, now we've got to do our best to ensure that funding for these extraordinary missions continues. We need a little over $300 million U.S. every year for the next five years. And it's a thing that people have a tendency to cut. And I stand by this all the time, Matt. Science is the best investment that you can make. This is the best thing that society can do for itself, is spend money on basic research, science, and especially space exploration, because it just stimulates the economy in subtle,

wonderful ways. We have this, you and I are talking by computer audio. We would not have the internet without space exploration. Well, hear, hear. I are talking by computer audio. We would not have the internet without space exploration. Well, hear, hear. I couldn't agree more. Well, I know. But Matt, wait, wait, there's more. So this week, the Planetary Society did a hangout. We had Jim Bell, one of the co-investigators on the Curiosity rover, and full disclosure, he's our president of the Planetary Society. He was on and talked to several hundred people who tuned in for a little over an hour. Emily Lakdawalla, Casey Dreyer and I. And then coming up, Matt, and I think you're deeply involved in this, we're going to expand our internet presence and have anybody who wants to, right, tune in to listen to the experts

running our projects. I sure hope so. That's one of the things we hope to do with our YouTube Live capabilities. And we'll be telling people more about that very soon. It's exciting. It is. We have to fight the good fight until the fiscal 14, 2014. 2014, Matt! Time flies.

I've got to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. Just like the budget. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, and he'll join us again here next week. John Dobson spent years on my planetary radio bucket list. I heard about his famous telescope design long before I knew the rest of his fascinating story. Born in China while World War I was raging in Europe,

it would be years before John caught the astronomy bug, and a few more years before he would revolutionize amateur astronomy by creating an instrument that was simple, cheap, forgiving, and amazingly powerful. This was after he had spent 23 years as a cloistered monk. John was eventually expelled from his monastery largely because he was spending so much time building telescopes for people. It wasn't long before he and a few young friends claimed a corner in San Francisco, inviting everyone who approached to take a peek through one of his magical instruments. That began more than four decades ago.

Now, let me take you back to the evening of August 4, 2012. It's a cool, clear night in Pasadena, California. Curiosity would land on Mars the next day. Sitting in the middle of a Planetary Society star party, on a folding chair, wrapped in a blanket, is John Dobson. Here again is the Pied Piper of astronomy. Mr. Dobson, it is really an honor to speak to you. There are amateur astronomers all over the world who are using telescopes based on your design. I know. It's called the Dobsonian Revolution.

One time I was at an astronomy club, and somebody was giving a talk about the Dobsonian Revolution, the Dobsonian Revolution. So I got up and said, all the previous revolutions were run with the cannons on Dobsonian mounts. That's right, I guess. Okay, so I had a Dob, 8-inch, and now I have another telescope from a famous manufacturer that is computerized and is all kinds of fancy technology.

But it's still 8 inches, but it's still your kind of mount. Yeah. Our 24-inch used to be 24 inches across the glass. But it's still... What's the aperture? It's 8 inches. But it's still your kind of mount. Yeah. Our 24-incher used to be 24 inches across the glass and 13-foot focal length. And it weighed 600 pounds. And my friends used to get on my case, you see, because they said it's not portable. But we've hauled it, and it weighed 600 pounds.

We've hauled it more than 80,000 miles and it's too late to tell me it's not portable. That was a 24-inch telescope. Yeah. We've hauled it more than 80,000 miles. It's been through at least 25 national parks. It's spent more than 100 nights at Glacier Point in Yosemite. What drove you to want to develop a telescope that could be so...

I wanted to see what the hell is out there. But you developed something that is so much more accessible, so much less expensive, so much cheaper than so much of the competition. That's because I couldn't afford all that fancy stuff. However, let me tell you how we first started grinding glass. I was in the monastery, and one of my friends said, he knew I wanted a telescope, but I had no way to get a telescope. And he said, you can grind your own glass.

That's all I needed to hear. We had been taking care of somebody with jaundice, you see. And I remembered that on his kitchen table, there was a glass, a round glass. I thought it was probably six inches in diameter and half an inch thick. So we asked him, how would you like to have it ground into a telescope? Oh, he would love it. He brought it over. It's a 12-inch porthole, one inch thick. It's a 12-inch porthole, one inch thick. That's where we started.

And then later on, I bought four and a half tons of ships' windows. I bought four and a half tons of ships' windows. And we made a lot of telescopes out of those things. Talk about what your experience is in San Francisco, that place where people knew they could find you. All right, let me tell you where we started. We started with a 9-year-old, a 17-year-old, and me, a 53-year-old. And so one of those, the 17-year- year old says what do we call ourselves so he had several names so when he said sidewalk astronomers I said let's call ourselves the sidewalk astronomers

so we got the telescopes out on the sidewalk at Jackson and Broderick streets in San Francisco and pretty soon and we were out there all the time when there was anything to see, every clear night. So very soon, the news spread through the Bay Area, if you want to look through a telescope, go to Jackson and Broderick on any clear night. And then you see what happened was people from all over the world looked through those telescopes and that's why it spread all over the world. Look what we see the amateur astronomers didn't have telescopes, that's not what they were doing. They had cameras and the camera weighs as much as a coffee can. And

the tracking device weighs half as much as a Ford. Okay? And when they saw us running around with big telescopes, they said, look what we could have been doing if we hadn't been taking these stupid pictures. Because your telescopes really were for people who just want to put their eye up to an eyepiece and see something. And never mind photographing it. Want to see it. So how did you, what led you to develop these unique mounts that are so simple?

Well, first, they're too simple to be unique. They're too simple to be unique. They move around like a chair anyway they move like your eyes they go around this way and they go up and down this way but if I had had money

I might have thought of something complicated but I didn't have any money we made the 24 incher in three months for $300. And a lot of elbow grease. Well, quite a bit of elbow grease. The other person used to run a machine shop, and he knows how to do everything, you see. So he got a trailer once we got the thing done he got a trailer for it and we hauled it more than 80,000 miles but it says a 13 foot focal length and a 12 foot tube. Oh I have to tell you a

funny story. When we first set it up he and I did not have a big enough vehicle to haul a 12-foot tube. So we wanted an 8-foot piece and a 4-foot piece of 30-inch tube. So I went down to the company that sells tube, and he's standing there and on the loading dock there's a eight foot piece and a four foot piece of 30 inch tube standing there on the loading dock and I said did you come down earlier and order this no he said didn't you this is left over from somebody else's order on that morning, a four-foot piece and an eight-foot piece of 30-inch tube. And I said to Brian Rhodes, something in this universe wants that 24. I think you were right.

The reprise of my conversation with John Dobson will continue in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions.

Where did we come from, and are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, We'll be it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Go to any telescope store or website, and it's likely that both the biggest and the least expensive quality telescopes on sale will be Dobs. That's short for Dobsonian, and we're in the middle of talking to their inventor. John Dobson was blown away when he first looked through a telescope he had built. His first thought was, everyone needs to see this. He has spent the rest

of his life giving people that opportunity. I joined him as an urban star party went on around us back on August 4, 2012, the evening before Curiosity's landing on Mars. So here you have this legacy of DOBS, as they're often called, Dobsonian telescopes, all over the world. Anyway, we ran around with a big telescope. We've run through probably more than 25 national parks. Now let me tell you how it goes in the national parks. We get there with a lot of telescopes, not just that one you see, but a 24-incher and an 18 18-inch and some other things you see. And then they let you give a slideshow

first. And then you flush all those people down those telescopes. Anyway, we've done that in 25 national parks. And in some of them we've done that in 25 national parks. And in some of them, we've done it a lot of times. Yosemite, we've done it a lot of times, not just once. Now I'm going to tell you another funny story. When we first set the 24-incher up at Glacier Point in Yosemite, the security ranger saw it, and he said, you'll have to take it down before dark.

That's good. What did you tell him? I was ready to pack and go, but Brian Rhodes, he was smarter than I, and he took the ranger over to the telephone, and they called the floor of the valley,

and we are staying. Yeah. So you're obviously very proud of that 24-inch scope. Yes. But what about all these tens of, maybe hundreds of thousands of scopes based on your design that have opened up astronomy for millions of people? Yes, but I don't know whether they let everybody look through them like we did on that one.

Ah, okay. How long has it been? That was a public telescope. It was used almost entirely for the public. And it was a very good mirror. Four professional astronomers have told me they never had a better show through anything at any time than through R24. Wow. through anything at any time than through R24. Wow.

How long has it been since you started spending these nights on that corner in San Francisco, which is a sneaky way of asking how old you are now? I'm 96 years old now, and that was a long time ago. Let me see. Hang on now. The sidewalk astronomers started in 1968. That's a long time ago, 44 years. Yeah, probably so. These telescopes are probably going to be around maybe forever, using your design.

If there was some easier way to do it, they wouldn't be around. There's no easier way to aim at the sky than to go around this way and up and down that way. If there was an easier way, I would have thought of it. I just got to say once again, it is an honor to be able to speak with you and share your words as your invention has been shared with so many people. Anyway, somebody had to get telescopes out for the rest of the world, not for astronomers. You know what? Somebody had to do it.

I think of it, it's kind of like that old metaphor of you can give a person fish or you can teach them how to fish, and you sort of gave a lot of people fishing poles. Fishing poles. I never thought of it that way. But anyway, they had some access to the sky. And not only that, but that's a good use for ships' windows. I bought four and a half tons of ships' windows.

Four and a half tons of ships' windows. Now, I'll just tell you a funny thing. It's 24 and a half inch, it's 18 and a half inch, it's 16 and a half inch. How come? No idea. Because if you put a 24 inch glass in a 24 inch hole, it goes straight out to sea. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Goes straight out to sea. So the porthole glasses come in an extra half inch. Almost all of them are. So it's a good thing they decided to make portholes circular instead of square. Yes.

Well, our first telescope we made when we were still in the monastery was made of a 12-inch porthole. You mentioned that story, the fellow with jaundice. Yeah, we had to take, yes. I thought, when I remembered it, I thought it was six inches in diameter and only half an inch thick. I was shocked when I saw what he brought over. It was a good start. And here is one of your scopes right over here. I mean, there's a dog. That's what I call a dinky one. And that's about the size that I had. Oh, okay. Thank you very much. Our 24-inch

sleeps three in the tube. Seriously? Yes, I've slept in there twice with two other people. Talk about getting into your invention. Yes, thank you. Thank you so much. It really has been a pleasure talking to you. Okay. Happy New Year, Bruce. Happy New Year.

Got you back on the Skype connection. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he's here to tell us what's up in the night sky. So tell us, how does that brand-new, annualized night sky look? Boy, that was dumb. Why? It looks annualized? I'll have to see if there's an annular solar eclipse. Yeah.

Sorry, I got nothing. I wasn't ready for you. Thanks for trying to save me. Go ahead. I tried. We'll just go straight into Jupiter. Check out Jupiter in the night sky. I know I keep saying it, but it's so quite lovely over there in the east in the early evening.

High up, super bright. And if you look near it, you'll see a reddish star pretty near it. That's Aldebaran and Taurus. And then look to the north of it, a little bit farther off, but one of the brightest stars in the sky that we'll be talking about a little bit later capella i saw jupiter and i saw that red star near it because i was up in the mountains here my little mini vacation and boy gorgeous skies at least if you go into the mountains yeah at least if you're a mile up yeah we've also got venus still visible but very low for the next few weeks. It's still hanging just barely low in the east in the pre-dawn. We've also got yellowish Saturn high in the southeast in the pre-dawn, getting higher and looking beautiful in the coming months.

I'll keep you posted. So check those things out. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1610, Matt. It was a big, big week in 1610. Galileo, having heard that there were some moons of Jupiter named after him, discovered them. Galileo discovered the Galilean satellites this week in 1610. He said in his best Italian accent, hey, look, there they are.

It's a more complicated story, but that's the gist of it. We move on to Random Space Fact. Having a happy new year. Oh, yeah. You know, Hubble's mirror, and just generally astronomical mirrors, but we'll talk about Hubble's. Hubble's primary mirror is really smooth. How smooth is it? Thank you.

If Hubble's primary mirror were scaled up to the diameter of the Earth, the biggest bump would only be 15 centimeters or about six inches tall. That's good. That's how smooth it is. That's smooth. This is great. So we've got the Hubble mirror. that's how smooth it is. That's smooth. This is great. So we've got the Hubble mirror, we've got Galileo, who's, no mirrors, but worked with lenses,

and John Dobson. It's a theme show. It is a theme show, but I'm probably going to leave the theme pretty quickly as we move on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, speaking of Capella, how many stars make up the Capella system, what we call the naked eye star Capella? How many stars are actually hanging out in that what our eyes see as one one dot? How do we do?

First of all, you have very much stuck with the theme, because how would we know that there are actually four stars in what we see as the single star Capella? With optics. Yeah, right. With with lenses, with them mirrors, those smooth things. It was holiday light was the reaction from listeners this time around, which, of course, improved the odds for those of you who did enter. And the odds were really good for Dave Scurlock, a first-time winner out of Omaha, Nebraska, who said, yep, four stars.

We left it to some other people to tell us that there are four stars in two binary pairs. Can you tell us more? In fact, they're kind of paired up pairs. One binary pair is made up of very large, bright stars, and the other pair has two red dwarf stars. Okay. Well, we are going to send Dave one of those year-in-space wall calendars that we're just about out of next week. The last one of those will get awarded. A great new prize that we'll be talking about in a moment.

But I have to tell you, Mark Wilson had a trivia question for you. How many stars are there in the Dagobah system? Oh, wow. Give up? I thought there was only one. and and and yes and his name is yoda humorous you are all right now we're going off theme well i suppose if you take the most a really really strained pun you might be staying on the theme. But pretty much you can ignore that.

Here's my question. Go in a little different direction than we usually go. What song by what group starts with the lyrics, We had a lot of luck on Venus. We always had a ball on Mars. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. I am stumped. You have until

the 14th, January 14. That'd be Monday at 2pm Pacific time to get us this answer. I can't wait to find out. And we have this wonderful prize. And what is that, Matt? Well, since we're out of calendars,

Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society, the science guy who we heard just minutes ago on thisars, Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society, the science guy who we heard just minutes ago on this program, Bill Nye will put his voice, he will record a message for your answering machine. In other words, people call, Bill will tell them that you're out, and something else, no doubt, very humorous. So that is the prize. And we hope you all... When do they need to have that in by then? Didn't I say? I think I did say, the 14th. I'm really fuzzy, so okay.

I'm just, I'm sorry. I thought maybe someone else didn't hear it. Well, they might not have. And you are fuzzy. I'm sorry, were you talking, Matt? Anyway, that's a cool prize. Say goodnight, Bruce. Alright, everybody go out there, look up at the night sky and think about mini blueberry muffins. Thank you and goodnight.

Don't need a telescope to smell those. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He's always cooking up something good for us here on What's Up. Join us next week at the annual conference of the American Astronomical Society. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, and by the farsighted members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies, John! Thank you.