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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Off Beat: Things are looking up for family telescope

By , Columbian Science, Military & History Reporter
Published:

The story that inspired the Giovannis’ gift.

For the last 10 years, Nick Giovanni’s telescope saw a lot more garage dust than stardust.

Now, following a Columbian story about a regional astronomy facility, the 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope has a new home at Goldendale Observatory State Park.

His family has been interested in astronomy for 50 years, said Giovanni, who moved to Vancouver in July. It’s not just driveway stargazing, either. His daughter was a University of Arizona student when she discovered a new class of star.

“During the 1960s and 1970s, like a lot of people, I became fascinated with space exploration,” Giovanni said. “I read all I could about space and planets.”

His brother Chris, also starstruck, bought the telescope in 1985. Nick Giovanni’s daughter Melissa took the family passion another step when she went to the University of Arizona in 1997 to study astronomy.

During a session with the 90-inch telescope at Kitt Peak Observatory, she told her instructor about an unusual object. In a science blog, the instructor described it as “the funniest-looking thing I’d ever seen.”

It was a newly discovered class of sub-dwarf B star that — as the blog reported — pulsates like Jell-O, quivering in space through hourlong cycles.

Chris decided his niece was the right person to own the keg-shaped telescope. But when she went back to college, Melissa left the bulky and expensive instrument with her dad.

“I would frequently take it to star parties,” said Nick Giovanni, a professor of hospitality management at Olympic College in Bremerton for 20 years.

After Melissa changed her major to the more employable field of geology, “the telescope resided in my garage, getting used less and less. I’d say that in the last 10 years, it was used only once or twice.”

In July, when Nick and Kathy Giovanni moved here, “We discovered a lot of things that we didn’t need anymore, and things that had not seen the light of day for many years.” (Or in the case of the telescope, the light of night.)

Two months later, Columbian reporter Susan Parrish wrote about the observatory 120 miles east of Vancouver. Giovanni contacted Troy Carpenter, the park’s interpretive specialist, about donating the telescope.

“We are putting it to use,” Carpenter said. “A public observatory is a nice place for a telescope to end up.”

And without The Columbian’s story, Giovanni said, it “would still be collecting dust in my garage.”

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Columbian Science, Military & History Reporter