In Memory

Joe Broniszewski introduced me to Greg Granville at a meeting of the Penn State Astronomy Club in mid-1990s. Greg, who was big and burly, said he was an amateur telescope maker, who hand ground mirrors for his Dobsonian telescopes, which were invented by John Dobson when he was a monk. Greg said “Dobs” were easier to transport to a dark site than the heavy duty equatorial mounted Newtonians of our youth such as the Criterion Dynascope 8″ Newtonian, which Greg also owned. Years later, John Dobson spoke at the club’s Black Forest Star Party at Cherry Springs Park.

Not being students, Joe, Greg and I couldn’t run for executive positions in the club, the leadership of which turned over almost every semester, so it was difficult for us to exert any lasting influence or for there to be any long-term goals or projects, hence the impetus for forming an astronomy club for non-students in State College. Greg and Joe did manage to persuade the Penn State club to purchase a portable Meade ETX-90 for dark sky observing since the club members usually observed from the light polluted sky on the roof of Davey Lab on campus, helping the Astronomy Department with the public outreach events, or near the University Park Airport where the club had use of an old, long brass refractor housed in an observatory dome. Not all of the students had cars, so on occasions when we went to a dark sky site, they packed into our cars.

At the time, Greg owned a Mitsubishi Eclipse, a two-seater sports car with oversized, flat profile racing tires. The interior was low and compact. I felt like I was getting into a Mercury capsule. One cold, clear winter’s night, Joe, Greg, Tom, and I drove to the game lands in Port Matilda. It snowed the night before, and the gravel road up to the field was icy, and Greg’s racing fires were no match for the glazed gravel, and his car slid into a ditch. Somehow, the three of us managed to push Greg’s car back onto the road, and we turned around and went down the road where Greg knew of another place to observe. The snow was so thick that we had to dig out holes for our telescopes. The work was worth it since the “seeing” and “transparency” were so good that night I could see patches of blue luminosity around the brightest four stars in the Pleaides with my Edmund Scientific 4 1/4’ mirror Astroscan. The other members were doubtful and thought I might be seeing condensation on the front glass plate on my scope, but Greg and Tom looked through their big Dobs, and lo and behold, they and Joe (who had brought toe-saving hot chocolate in a thermos) saw the much elusive blue luminosity around the four of the “Seven Sisters,” which was uncommon to see without a CCD camera.

On another winter’s night, Greg, Joe and I were observing in the Penn State Ag Fields near Mount Nittany when Greg spotted a flashing object near the Orion Nebula in his telescope. At first, we thought it might be a high flying jet or a tumbling satellite, but it didn’t move against the background stars. Joe timed the flashes and they were consistent. The “February Flasher,” as we dubbed it, was a mystery until Greg looked online later that week and found the flasher was a derelict Japanese communications satellite that Japan had parked in geosynchronous orbit, so that it stayed in the same spot as the Earth turned. We were hoping we had discovered an exceptionally long gamma ray burst, but finding a derelict satellite was also cool.

I learned a lot about observing the night sky from Greg, including how to star hop and to use averted vision to see dim DSOs. I also learned that amateur astronomy took great patience especially in Centre County where on some nights, the best you could hope for was to catch a DSO through a passing “sucker hole” in the clouds.
Greg had the patience, not only to wait for clear skies and to set up his telescope, but also to deal with clumsy novices. He often spent about a half hour setting up his Dob, which he had mounted on a homemade, clock drive alt-azimuth platform. One night after he finally finished setting up his scope and drive, a club member, not seeing the wires, accidentally tripped over them and pulled them out with his foot. I thought Greg was going to have conniptions. The member, which may or may not have been me, apologized. “No problem,” said Greg calmly, and then took out his toolbox, fixed the frayed wire, plugged the drive back in, and finally began observing with his homemade Dob. Not long afterward, he said: Hey, take a look at the “ET Cluster,” and club members gathered around Greg’s scope to gaze at something they had never seen before—a star cluster, which if you had your head titled at the right angle, looked like “ET” from the Spielberg movie pointing his long alien finger toward his home in the sky.

“GO TO” scopes with a catalog of thousands of objects were just beginning to come into the amateur telescope market, but Greg didn’t need GO-TO, he was our club’s GO-TO. Thank you Greg for sharing your extensive knowledge of observing the night sky with members of the Central Pennsylvania Observers. You will be missed.

— Brock Pronko