Kurt, you have to understand John Dobson. His theories should not be classed with mainstream, peer-reviewed science in most cases. There may be something to his ideas, there may not be, but if you spend hours searching the Web for corroborration or refutation of some of his ideas, as you apparently did for the gegenschien theory, you probably won't get any closer to hard data in his camp. http://quanta-gaia.org/dobson/ Dobson doesn't think like a typical scientist although he does understand hard science. His ideas on cosmology and astronomy are not as well-known as his "sidewalk" telescope concept. But he's a package deal and if you like him, you tend to ignore the bits you can't quite reconcile. Most of us are not motivated to tell the emperor that he has no clothes, at least not yet. He's too entertaining; and besides it's not as if we are defending a thesis. On 9/9/07, Kurt Fisher <fisherka@csolutions.net> wrote:
Kim wrote:
At Bryce Canyon NP in June I had an interesting conversation with John Dobson regarding the gegenschein. I've always understood that the source of both the zodiacal light and gegenschein is sunlight reflected from interplanetary comet dust. In his characteristic way, John said, "NO!" According to John, the source is actually reflected sunlight from dust-size fused silica (glass) beads blasted from the surface of the Moon by impacts.
It is possible that I've missed an article, there doesn't seem to be much support for this statement in the journal literature.