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Br. Guy Consolmagno

About Br. Guy Consolmagno

Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ is Director of the the Vatican Observatory and President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. A native of Detroit, Michigan, he earned undergraduate and masters' degrees from MIT, and a Ph. D. in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona; he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard and MIT, served in the US Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught university physics at Lafayette College before entering the Jesuits in 1989.

At the Vatican Observatory since 1993, his research explores connections between meteorites, asteroids, and the evolution of small solar system bodies, observing Kuiper Belt comets with the Vatican's 1.8 meter telescope in Arizona, and applying his measure of meteorite physical properties to understanding asteroid origins and structure. Along with more than 200 scientific publications, he is the author of a number of popular books including Turn Left at Orion (with Dan Davis), and most recently Would You Baptize an Extraterrestial? (with Father Paul Mueller, SJ). He also has hosted science programs for BBC Radio 4, been interviewed in numerous documentary films, appeared on The Colbert Report, and for more than ten years he has written a monthly science column for the British Catholic magazine, The Tablet.

Dr. Consolmagno's work has taken him to every continent on Earth; for example, in 1996 he spent six weeks collecting meteorites with a NASA team on the blue ice regions of East Antarctica. He has served on the governing boards of the Meteoritical Society; the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences (of which he was chair in 2006-2007); and IAU Commission 16 (Planets and Satellites). In 2000, the small bodies nomenclature committee of the IAU named an asteroid, 4597 Consolmagno, in recognition of his work. In 2014 he received the Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences for excellence in public communication in planetary sciences.

Orbit of Asteroid 4597 Consolmagno

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #14: Waiting for the sun

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This entry is part 14 of 14 in the series Stupid astronomer

We’re running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we’re including this blatant clickbait series… Besides, it’s a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT! The old astronomer tells the tale… People think that astronomers come in two varieties, observers and theorists. But in fact there is a third group, a lively bunch of laboratory experimentalists who help the rest of us understand what we observe and what we need theories to explain. For example, it’s not enough to take spectra of stars or planets; you have to know what each of those lines and dips in the spectra mean. That requires work in the lab to measure the spectra of pure elements, or minerals, or the kinds of gases you might expect to find in a planet’s atmosphere. With the advances in advanced visible and infrared detectors in the … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #13: Weak tea

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This entry is part 13 of 14 in the series Stupid astronomer

Starting our final week! We’re running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we’re including this blatant clickbait series… Besides, it’s a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT! The old astronomer tells the tale… When I was a graduate student, we were paid a stipend by the department, money that our professors had written into their grants to pay for students. Our income was $300 per month, spread over ten months. (Summer salaries were another story; if they existed at all.) You could just about make ends meet on this salary so long as you didn’t have pesky needs like doctors or dentists or anything unexpected. Most of us got by on the basis of coming from families with enough money to backstop us. No surprise that the overwhelming majority of us were white, male, and mostly Protestant… … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #12: Taking note

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This entry is part 12 of 14 in the series Stupid astronomer

We’re running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we’re including this blatant clickbait series… Besides, it’s a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT! The old astronomer tells the tale… Many years ago, when there was only one telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, astronomers were expected to actually work inside the telescope dome at 15,000 feet rather than observing from a remote office somewhere down the hill. During that epoch, a famous astronomer went up Mauna Kea for the first time to observe. Astronomers are very careful to keep detailed observing logs of what they observed, the weather conditions, etc.; also, they need to keep a record of which exposures were recording your target, which were standard stars, etc. It matters how high up in the sky your object was, that is to say how much atmosphere you … Continue reading →

ⓜ By Design (Interview, and response)

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This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series And Then I Wrote

(And Then I Wrote…) Since this site began more than six years ago, every Thursday I have been publishing a reprint from my column “Across the Universe” in the British Catholic journal, The Tablet. I have finally gone through all of them (except for 2019’s columns) and I’ve even re-published a few of the oldest ones that came out here before our readership had grown.  In order to let my backlog build up a bit, I am taking “Across the Universe” offline for 2020. Instead, I am republishing a selection of other articles that I have written an published in various places… often obscure.   Interview and Response: At an early Astrobiology conference (in 2005), the NASA online magazine Astrobiology did an interview of me; here’s what they ran: (Click Here for the version on their site) After this ran, someone wrote to me challenging me on a few of my points and wanting to know just what it was … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #11: Flattening the field

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This entry is part 11 of 14 in the series Stupid astronomer

We’re running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we’re including this blatant clickbait series… Besides, it’s a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT! The old astronomer tells the tale… A certain mechanically-inclined graduate student was observing star fields at the Schmidt telescope, a telescope that used photographic plates. (This was a while ago; nobody makes these plates anymore.) This fascinating telescope design doesn’t have any eyepiece; it is designed solely to take a photographic image of a wide field of the sky, often several degrees wide, using a series of corrector lenses and mirrors to insure that the stars are in sharp focus from one side of the plate to the other. But when this student opened up the telescope to insert the photographic plate, he noticed that the plate holder was warped. Quickly, using his mechanical … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #10: The dark side of the moon

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This entry is part 10 of 14 in the series Stupid astronomer

Down to our last 10 days! We’re running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we’re including this blatant clickbait series… Besides, it’s a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT! The old astronomer tells the tale… There is an effect called the Opposition Effect where solid bodies such as the Moon and Mars get significantly brighter when they are opposite the Sun. Part of the reason is the fact that the whole disk looks brighter when there are no shadows; the Full Moon is 40% brighter than the Moon even only one day before or after. (Check this out for yourself!) But when the the light is virtually exactly behind you (“zero phase angle”, or at least an angle much less than one degree) there is a second effect that kicks in, called coherent backscatter, which is due … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #9: Life in Outer Spaces

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This entry is part 9 of 14 in the series Stupid astronomer

We’re running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members, and it actually seems to be working! – and as a part of it we’re including this blatant clickbait series… Besides, it’s a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT! The old astronomer tells the tale… Telescope operators on Mauna Kea work for a number of nights on the telescope at 15,000 feet, sleeping during the day at a facility several thousand feet down the mountain. They then get time off to go home and visit family. This systems allows them to stay acclimated to the thin air at the top of the mountain while they are at work, an issue that is obvious to anyone who spends time at altitude. However, thin air isn’t the only problem you can encounter while living that much closer to the edge of outer space… One telescope operator used to … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #8: Red letter day

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This entry is part 8 of 14 in the series Stupid astronomer

We’re running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members, which maybe is ambitious but we are adding a few new people every day, thanks! – and as a part of it we’re including this blatant clickbait series… Besides, it’s a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT! The old astronomer tells the tale… There were several groups at different telescopes on different peaks in the area, all looking to record the occultation of a star by Neptune. The goal was to see how Neptune’s atmosphere made the star dim as its light passed through first the upper, then the lower atmosphere. Everything was working well. We’d had a guest with us earlier in the evening, but they couldn’t stand the early hours and had gone back to the dorm to get some sleep. They took the white flashlight with them, but that was OK; we normally use … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #7: Positive feedback

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This entry is part 7 of 14 in the series Stupid astronomer

We’re running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we’re including this blatant clickbait series… Besides, it’s a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT! The old astronomer tells the tale… When I arrived, the lab was proud to boast that it had its own computer! It was, as I recall, a CDC 6400, with about as much power as your watch when it is asleep… but it took up a room the size of a classroom in the building. A special raised floor above all the cables. And, of course, a jacked up air conditioning system to take care of all the heat it put out. But times change, technology changes, and even computers changed. Eventually it was replaced by a new-fangled “mini-computer” (probably a PDP-11 but I don’t actually recall) which was merely the size of a … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #6: Key observation

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This entry is part 6 of 14 in the series Stupid astronomer

We’re running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members, and we’re well on our way – and as a part of it we’re including this blatant clickbait series… Besides, it’s a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT! The old astronomer tells the tale… A researcher asked to sign out the department truck in order to run an errand. The keys were duly handed over: a key ring containing a metal tag with the vehicle number, and two keys. Moments later, the frustrated researcher came running back to the office, keys in hand, insisting to the Admin that they were the wrong keys. A quick trip to the parking lot with the researcher confirmed that the department had only truck in the lot and it had the same vehicle number as the one hanging from the key tag. “But the key won’t open the truck door,” insisted … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #5: Opening a can of…

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This entry is part 5 of 14 in the series Stupid astronomer

We’re running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members, and we’re nearly 10% of the way there so far, thanks! – and as a part of it we’re including this blatant clickbait series… Besides, it’s a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT! The old astronomer tells the tale… As we know, most astronomy runs on coffee. (Except, of course, for the excellent astronomy department at Brigham Young University, the LDS equivalent of the Vatican Observatory; Mormons don’t drink coffee!) So you can picture the scene… A senior professor, a theorist needless to say, came into the Admin Assistant’s office with a can opener in hand, and a puzzled look on his face. “We’re out of coffee,” he said. Before the Admin could growl at him, he hastened to add, “I know, your job is not to make coffee for us; and I am willing to make … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #4: Keep Calm

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This entry is part 4 of 14 in the series Stupid astronomer

We’re running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we’re including this blatant clickbait series… Besides, it’s a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT! The old astronomer tells the tale… As a guest in one of the University telescope domes, I watched as two observers set up for a planetary occultation observation. The senior astronomer worked quickly to get a strip chart recorder fixed (this was a while ago!) before the observations were to begin, while the grad student opened the dome and readied the telescope.   In those days, when you actually worked in the dome, you also had a finderscope with an eyepiece. But looking through the eyepiece, the student reported in a panicked voice, that nothing could be seen! I looked up into the dome. The telescope was pointed at the wall. I decided to let … Continue reading →