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Christopher M. Graney

About Christopher M. Graney

Christopher M. Graney is professor of physics and astronomy at Jefferson Community & Technical College in Louisville, Kentucky (USA), where he helps keep the college’s observatory running. For some years now his research focus has been the history of astronomy, especially the late 16th and early 17th centuries. That research has resulted in two books: Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science Against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo (2015), and Mathematical Disquisitions: The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo (2017), both published by the University of Notre Dame Press. Graney is also editor of the Vatican Observatory Faith and Science pages.

Growing Suspect of Religion, not Science

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On the Vatican Observatory Faith and Science pages there is a really cool entry that readers of The Catholic Astronomer should take a look at.  The entry consists of an excerpt from the Tahāfut al-falāsifa, or The Incoherence of the Philosophers, of Abu Hāmid Muhammad Ibn Muhammad al-Tūsi al-Ghazālī.  (The excerpt is fully downloadable in PDF format.)  Al-Ghazālī, who lived in the eleventh century, is one of medieval Islam’s best-known religious intellectuals. Al-Ghazālī says that disputing matters of science on the basis of religious texts or ideology is a waste of time.  Moreover, he says the atheists love it when people of faith do such things, because, he says, “then the atheist’s path for refuting religion becomes easy”.  He says that once something is scientifically well-established (for example, the mechanism by which eclipses occur), then whoever inspects them and is convinced by their evidence, deriving for himself information about the extent, times of occurrence, and duration of these two kinds … Continue reading →

The Observatory and The Midnight Mass

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In my post last week about the Alvan Clark refractor at the Cincinnati Observatory, I mentioned that the observatory was originally built in the 1840s in a part of Cincinnati called Mt. Adams (located just east of downtown Cincinnati on the Ohio River) but it moved three decades later to its current location.  It is now located in a neighborhood of Cincinnati called Mt. Lookout.  A drawing and photograph of the original observatory building on Mt. Adams are seen below. The observatory was moved on account of pollution.  There is a painting in the Cincinnati Art Museum that illustrates just how bad the pollution at Mt. Adams was, and how difficult it would have been to do astronomy there.  The painting is by Edward Timothy Hurley, painted in oil on canvas in 1911.  Its title is “The Midnight Mass” (it is featured on Google Arts & Culture).  It portrays Immaculata Church, which is still there on Mt. Adams.  The Cincinnati … Continue reading →

Crank It Up: The Cincinnati Observatory’s Alvan Clark Telescope

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Readers of The Catholic Astronomer should visit the Cincinnati (Ohio) Observatory—it is a fantastic place to go for anyone who likes astronomy, history, or science education.  The observatory dates back to the 1840s.  It was the creation of Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel, who raised money for the observatory by selling public shares (and who was from Kentucky, I might add).  In 1843, former U.S. president John Quincy Adams traveled to Cincinnati to lay the cornerstone for the observatory on a hill in Cincinnati now known as Mt. Adams (named for the president).  When he was president, Adams had wanted the U.S. to build an observatory but could not persuade the U.S. Congress to do so. The Cincinnati observatory’s first telescope was a large refracting telescope made in Bavaria by Merz and Mahler.  However, as Cincinnati grew, the air at Mt. Adams became more and more polluted, to the point where it interfered with the observatory’s work.  In 1873 the Merz and … Continue reading →

Monsignor Bouchet’s Telescope (re-run)

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This is a “re-run” of a post that originally ran on January 18, 2017. My post for next week will feature a cool old telescope, so it seem fitting to re-run this post about a cool old telescope. Astronomy pops up in unexpected places.  Consider, for example, this fantastic old refracting telescope: This telescope has an aperture of roughly 4 inches (10 centimeters).  The tube appears to be brass.  The telescope has a very stout wooden case, visible in the picture above.  The picture below gives another view of the telescope, the case (now open), and an eyepiece for the telescope (lying to the left of the telescope). By now you have probably noticed the telescope’s surroundings, namely the monstrances and crucifix on display in the background.  Why is an old telescope sitting on a table, surrounded by religious articles?  Because this is the telescope of Monsignor Michael Bouchet (1827 to 1903), former vicar-general of the Diocese of Louisville, Kentucky.  … Continue reading →

ⓜ Galileo’s Newly-Discovered Letter: The Scholarship is Published

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(ⓜ = members only!) In January I ran a post here at The Catholic Astronomer about the newly-discovered letter that Galileo wrote and (according to the journal Nature) lied about—click here for that post.  The Nature articles concerning Galileo’s letter were “news” or “opinion” articles, written by Nature’s editors and correspondents.  They were not research papers written by the scholars who found the letter: Michele Camerota of the Università degli Studi di Cagliari, and Franco Giudice and Salvatore Ricciardo of Università degli Studi di Bergamo.  Now a scholarly, peer-reviewed paper, written by those scholars regarding the letter, has been published, and so I thought I’d follow up with a little analysis. In order to read the rest of this post, you have to be a paid-up member of Sacred Space, and logged in as such!…     … Continue reading →

Astronomy in Art & Architecture: The Stars of St. Joseph

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Here is another “Astronomy in Art & Architecture” discovery (click here for all the “Art & Architecture” posts): St. Joseph Church in Leitchfield, Kentucky (Diocese of Owensboro, Kentucky, USA). St. Joseph is just off the main square in Leitchfield, and it invites the passer-by to stop in and take a look. Hey, if you were touring through a small town in Italy you would want to make a stop in the town church, so of course you want to do the same thing when touring through a small town in Kentucky! Above the altar in St. Joseph, which is a lovely church to stop in and see, is a painting of the death of St. Joseph. According to the book Freely You Have Received, Freely Give: 75 Years of the Diocese of Owensboro Kentucky, this painting came from the cathedral in Bardstown, Kentucky—this being the cathedral when Bardstown was the seat of the first inland diocese in the US (the … Continue reading →

Ladyzhenskaya’s Icon

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On March 7 the “Google Doodle” featured mathematician Olga Ladyzhenskaya.  If you clicked on the “doodle” you probably saw something like the Wikipedia entry that showed up at the top corner of the screen: Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya was a Russian mathematician. She was known for her work on partial differential equations and fluid dynamics. She provided the first rigorous proofs of the convergence of a finite difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations. I wanted to find out a little more about this person, and in searching around I came upon a 10-year-old blog post from Mihai Caragiu, Professor of Mathematics at Ohio Northern University, who noted a “photograph of a 79 years old Ladyzhenskaya in her apartment in St. Petersburg featuring an icon of the Most Holy Theotokos [Mother of God]”.  I could not really tell for sure that the woman in the picture was Ladyzhenskaya, and there was not additional information, but a little more searching quickly turned up … Continue reading →

Annie Jump Cannon: Two Books

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Annie Jump Cannon was an astronomer with Harvard Observatory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  She was one of a number of women who were hired by Edward Pickering, the director of the observatory at that time.  Cannon’s specialty was stars and their spectra.  She worked on the Henry Draper catalog of stars, and she is the one who developed the OBAFGKM classification system for stars (O stars being the hottest, M being the coolest).  If you know that the sun has a spectral type G, or that Rigel is a type B, you are referencing Cannon’s classification system. But Cannon was the author of another book besides the Henry Draper catalog.  When she was in her late 20’s she went to Spain to photograph an eclipse of the sun.  Cannon had received a degree in physics from Wellesley college.  After graduation she had returned home, where she taught herself photography, tutored students in math and history, and … Continue reading →

A Most Strange Debate (re-run)

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This is a “re-run” of a post that originally ran on June 1, 2016. The other day, while searching the web for something regarding the history of astronomy, I happened upon the strangest video. In it were what appeared to be Philips Lansbergen and Johann Georg Locher (featured in recent blog posts). They were debating the idea of the multiverse and the idea of invoking the infinite in science. Also present were Thomas Digges and Giovanni Battista Riccioli. And with these four late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth century figures were four others from entirely different times: the ancient Roman poet Lucretius, the twentieth-century historian of science Alexandre Koyré, and physicists Brian Greene and Max Tegmark, from today! The conversation was most remarkable. I would include a link, but the video crashed my laptop, I had been too absorbed in watching it to think to copy and save the address, and now for some reason I can’t find the video again. Fortunately, along with the … Continue reading →

Navigating the Fourth Day of Creation by means of Jupiter’s Moons

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Once, at the beginning of a semester, on the second meeting of an Astronomy 101 class, one of my students piped up with a comment.  She said that when she had told a certain person (her grandmother, if I recall correctly) that she would be taking an astronomy class, that person had responded by saying that astronomy in particular and science in general was the stuff of devil-worshipers. My student thus offered the class a wonderful comment.  She was seeking from the outset of class to engage the material, her professor, and her fellow students with a very honest comment, expressing honest fears (her grandmother’s, and perhaps hers, too).  Her comment reflected a sentiment that is not uncommon among students taking science classes—a fear that there is something about science that is contrary to their religion, and in that way there is something about science that is the work of the devil.  (This view is not limited to grandmothers of … Continue reading →

Capturing the Other Kind of Eclipse: A Photography Student puts his Skills to Work

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Readers who have been following The Catholic Astronomer for a while may recall a post from 2017 about Dang Nguyen and his efforts to photograph the August 2017 total solar eclipse (click here for that post).  Nguyen is a student at my college (Jefferson Community & Technical College in Louisville, Kentucky), in the Communication Arts Technology program (a very cool program—their students win awards on a regular basis), studying photography.  Well during the January 2019 total lunar eclipse, he got out the camera and went to work again.  Check out the photos below!     … Continue reading →

Fond Memories of the Vatican Observatory

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I was surfing around last month through some of the Vatican Observatory’s different on-line presences when I came upon some photos from the V.O.’s 1999 Summer School.  The two photos below especially caught my eye.  The woman wearing the yellow sash looked vaguely familiar.  And there was a caption that identified her as “Mercedes Richards”.  When I was in graduate school at the University of Virginia, one of the astronomers there was named Mercedes Richards.  Could this be the same person?  How many people named Mercedes Richards are going to be connected to the world of astronomy, anyway? It turns out that the woman at the 1999 summer school was indeed the same Mercedes Richards who was the astronomer at the University of Virginia.  Regrettably, Richards passed away three years ago tomorrow.  Her obituary is available from several sources.  Most versions of the obituary specifically note her “fond memories” of her time “in 1999 at the Vatican Observatory in Castel … Continue reading →