Astronomers and Their Dobs: Paying a Twitter Tribute to John Dobson

Amateur astronomer Stephen Uitti and his Dobsonian telescope.

Amateur astronomers love their Dobs. As we said in a previous article, “A Dobsonian is simplicity in itself; a simple set of optics on a simple mount. But don’t be fooled by this simplicity. Dobsonian telescopes are incredibly good and are great for amateurs and professional astronomers alike.”

And so, we were all saddened to learn of the passing of John Dobson, the inventor of this beloved telescope. We asked our followers on Twitter to tweet pictures of their Dobs, and our feed got flooded with pics and remembrances. See a bunch of our retweets below:

You can see more on our Twitter feed.

Jupiter Gets Smacked Yet Again?

It looks like once again, Jupiter has taken a hit! And once again an amateur astronomer spotted and captured the event. Masayuki Tachikawa was observing Jupiter on at 18:22 Universal Time on August 20th (early on August 21 in Japan) and his video camera captured a 1-second-long flash on the planet’s disk, along the northern edge of the gas giant’s North Equatorial Belt. The event was reported by astronomer Junichi Watanabe from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, on his blog.
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