22 April 2004

Observing Location	Tribeca Film Festival, Regal Theater, New York, NY
Observational Period	1730-1930 EDT
Atmospheric Conditions
Instruments	none
Observing Party	Charlie Ridgway

Tonight I attended the US premiere screening of the film A Sidewalk Astronomer. It is a biography of John Dobson, the inventor of the Dobsonian telescope mount and sidewalk astronomy. I am generally not that big into biography although I have been reading more of them lately and am realizing that they are history books and history books are biographies. But I really enjoyed this movie. There is no narrator telling you about John Dobson. It is all John Dobson telling you about John Dobson.

The opening scene starts out with Dobson standing on a street corner in San Francisco doing sidewalk astronomy. The Ohhhs and Ahhhs as people look through his scope at the moon are very familiar sounds. Some of his telescopes look like they are made with bubble gum and bailing wire (for you city slickers that is the wire that is used nowadays to "tie" up bales of hay). Dobson is quite a character with seldom a straight line. But he gets his point across. And he has so much energy that the movie never drags.

A little bit of the movie is devoted to his life and his role in popularizing home telescope building. Most of the movie is concerned with Dobson's views on cosmology, which seem to be at odds with those of main stream cosmologists. There is a lot of food for thought there.