John Dobson, inventor of the Dobsonian telescope design.
(The LAT obit is nice, but it doesn’t really give a sense of what the Dobsonian design is or how it works. Here’s the Wikipedia entry, if you’re curious.)
(And Dobson sounds like someone I would have very much liked to have had coffee with. A monk who allegedly got kicked out of the monastery because of his obsession with observational astronomy and telescope building? I bet he’d have been a lot of fun to talk to.)
Noted classical conductor Claudio Abbado. LAT.
Edited to add: Sorry, just ran across this one while reading the local news. Noted Texas songwriter Steven Fromholz passed away on Sunday. Various reports indicate that he died in a hunting accident:
…Fromholz, who lives in the area, and his girlfriend were going to hunt feral hogs. A rifle was in a case but unzipped at the bottom. The gun was being transferred from one vehicle to another.
Ariste says Fromholz grabbed the handle, the gun partly fell, hit the ground and discharged.
The Stateman reports it was a shotgun, not a rifle.
EtA2: Added link to non-paywalled Statesman blog entry.