Salvino Galea: The Maltese stargazer who gave the islands a telescope and a new horizon

Appreciation: Salvino Galea – the quiet force who taught Malta to look up

Most Maltese children learn the name “Galea” in a traffic jam: the family’s ironmongery on the Birkirkara bypass is a landmark for parents fumbling for directions. Few realise that the same surname, painted in discreet gold on a workshop door in Ħamrun, belongs to the man who gave the islands their first working telescope and, with it, a new way of seeing themselves.

Salvino Galea – engineer, tinkerer, self-taught astronomer – died last week at 78, leaving behind a sky-full of converts and a nation that finally understands why the Milky Way is worth switching off a few streetlights for. In a country where “science” is too often equated with dusty school textbooks, Galea made the cosmos feel like the village square: familiar, shared, alive.

Born in 1945 above his mother’s grocery in Strait Street, he grew up surrounded by wartime barter and American jazz drifting from doorways. While other boys collected shrapnel, Salvino hoarded discarded radio valves. By 14 he had built a short-wave set powerful enough to pick up the BBC World Service; by 16 he was charging neighbours to repair their Roberts radios, undercutting the Anglican chaplain who had previously held the monopoly.

The pivot to the heavens came accidentally. In 1969 a cousin returned from Toronto with a dented Tasco refractor bought at a garage sale. The tube was bent, the mount frozen solid. Galea spent three months machining new parts on a lathe he had cobbled together from a sewing-machine motor. When he finally wheeled the resurrected scope onto the roof of the Augustinian convent in Valletta – the highest point he could access without a permit – the moon landing was three weeks away. Half the convent, plus a procession of curious passers-by, climbed the spiral stairs to watch humanity’s first steps projected on a bedsheet. “I didn’t see Armstrong,” Salvino later laughed, “but I saw 60 Maltese faces realising the sky is not ceiling.”

That night birthed the Malta Astronomical Society – initially just a mimeographed newsletter slipped inside parish bulletins. Galea typed it on carbon paper, paying for stamps by repairing television sets after work. Membership climbed from six to 600 within five years. In 1978 he negotiated with the Curia to convert a derelict gunpowder magazine on the Dingli cliffs into the islands’ first observatory. Farmers thought him mad – “You’ll spy on our fields!” – until he showed them Saturn’s rings and invited them to name a star after each newborn grandchild.

The Dingli observatory still stands, its white dome a favourite silhouette for wedding photographers. Inside, the 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain that Galea assembled from mail-order mirrors and an old X-ray machine tracks asteroids the size of Gozo. Between 1983 and 2010, Maltese amateurs logged 67 near-Earth objects; 42 discoveries carry Galea’s initials in the Minor Planet Circular. Yet he refused to patent the equatorial mount he designed, insisting knowledge “should travel like the wind over the Grand Harbour, free and a little salty.”

Generations of students remember his Friday night open sessions: thermos coffee, ħobż biż-żejt, and the stern instruction to “look with your eyes, not with your phone.” Many became pilots, surveyors, even the current Deputy Director of the European Space Agency’s planetary defence office. “I owe him my orbit,” Dr Tanya Borg tweeted on hearing of his death. “He taught me that Malta is not too small to touch the sky.”

Galea’s final public appearance was last winter, wheelchair pushed by his granddaughter to the new planetarium in Esplora. Light pollution was the enemy now, he warned, brandishing a sky-quality meter like a sabre. “We conquered the darkness during the war,” he told a room of nine-year-olds. “Now we must save it.” The House of Representatives has since approved a dark-sky heritage zone around Dingli; MPs on both sides cited “Galea’s gift” in their speeches.

The workshop in Ħamrun is shuttered this week, draped with a black flag and a single placard: “Mera l-istilla – jibqa’ l-ħsieb.” (The mirror sees the stars – the thought remains.) Yet every evening, strangers still leave folding chairs on the pavement, tilting their heads as if the man himself might emerge with a rag and a bottle of acetone, ready to wipe the dust off infinity.

Malta has lost its starman; the sky, mercifully, keeps his light.