Goodbye Ron

The International Year of Astronomy 2009 has been diminished. Ron Ravneberg, a prolific amateur telescope maker who was a driving force in the "Dobsonian Revolution" of the 1980s, has lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 60 years old.

His most famous telescope was probably "Alice," an 8" Dobsonian that he designed to fold up small enough that it could be taken on his first trip to Alice Springs in Australia. That telescope was the inspiration to the telescope I designed and built many years ago called "Twisted Alice" (the scope design on my home page). Ron later built his own version of Twisted Alice with much better execution, but he went out of his way to credit me with the tweak to his original design when he published an article about his newest scope in Amateur Astronomy magazine. I never forgot his generosity.



Thanks, Ron. You will be missed.