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Christopher M. Graney

About Christopher M. Graney

Christopher M. Graney is an Adjunct Scholar at the Vatican Observatory, and 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.

Errors Published for Children

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An abundance of erroneous information can be found in books.  Unfortunately, that includes science books for children.  Recently I have been perusing children’s science books, looking for good material for the Vatican Observatory Faith & Science site, and I keep coming across things like the images below—a page from Scientists Who Made History: Isaac Newton (published 2001 by Raintree Steck-Vaughn Publishers: A Harcourt Company).  This is from a section of the book that talks about Newton studying the motions of the planets. Note the caption that reads “An early diagram from the 1600s showing the movements of the planets, all of which are travelling around the Sun in the center of the illustration”.  But note that, in fact, the Sun is not in the center of the illustration.  The Earth is in the center.  It is not travelling around the Sun; the Sun is travelling around it. The diagram is of the theory of Tycho Brahe.  Brahe’s name can be … Continue reading →

Navy Jets Harassed by Magical Mermaid Tic Tac UFOs!

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Have you heard the news about the UFOs and the Navy pilots?  It has been covered by a variety of media outlets.  Years ago there existed a cheesy tabloid newspaper called the Weekly World News.  You could find copies for sale in the check-out lanes of grocery stores.  The front page of the WWN always featured some sort of bizarre story about half-human/half-bat creatures, or Bigfoot, or (of course) UFOs and Space Aliens.  The WWN is gone from the checkout lanes, but today it is the major news outlets that are providing coverage of UFOs and Space Aliens. The UFO coverage relates to U.S. Navy pilots who have reported encountering objects shaped like “Tic Tac” candies, but large (up to 40 feet long).  The Tic Tacs reportedly fly about and perform all sorts of incredible aerial maneuvers.   Just recently the Navy confirmed that certain video clips related to these reports (video clips that have been banging around the internet for … Continue reading →

Leonis Regis Sol

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A month or so ago I was picking on the new “Lion King” movie for how unrealistic was its depiction of the night sky, despite everything else in the movie seeming so realistic in appearance.  Well, I have discovered another interesting critique of the “Lion King” sky.  It was on the WRAL (North Carolina) Weathercenter Blog.  There Tony Rice writes that While the animals and landscapes in [the 2019 “Lion King”] are photorealistic, the sunrise that opens this shot-for-shot remake is less realistic than the hand-drawn original. Rice compares the 1994 and 2019 versions of the movie, providing images of the sunrise from both, and noting how the 2019 version does not show the pronounced rippling effect that is seen in the 1994 version.  He writes: In the 2019 [version] the sun is rounder, nearly white and emerges smoothly above the horizon. The 1994 version shows a deeper yellow, almost orange, more flattened sun rippling its way up.  The undulating … Continue reading →

Astronomy in Art & Architecture: Observatory Park and the Cathedral, Denver

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Consider the picture below for your top ten list of “things that you just do not see every day”.  Note the houses, the baseball game in the park, and… the observatory.  How often do you see a baseball game being played next to an observatory, in a park in a residential neighborhood? You might see it every summer day if you lived in a certain neighborhood south of downtown Denver (Colorado, USA).  This park—called “Observatory Park”—is indeed in a residential neighborhood, and it is the home of Chamberlin Observatory of the University of Denver.  The small building in the picture above is Chamberlin’s student observatory.  The view below, of the same student observatory but from the opposite direction, shows the main building. There is not just a baseball diamond near the observatory; behind the main building is a playground.  The playground features a bit of astronomy-themed art, which is of course appropriate for Observatory Park.  A very stylized solar system, … Continue reading →

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau – Google Doodle Scientist

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There is a new “Google Doodle” for a scientist today—Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau.  You have probably seen it.  Google states that his work “led to the birth of cinema”.  Well, guess what?  According to an old edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia, Plateau was “a sincere Christian, faithful to all the duties of a practical Catholic”. If you are interested in his work, the journal Physics in Perspective published an article on him in 2012: “The Life and Work of Joseph Plateau: Father of Film and Discoverer of Surface Tension”.  Click here for an excerpt.  Click here to get the entire article from Physics in Perspective.  The entire article is also freely available via EBSCO, through many public and academic libraries. Plateau was born in 1801 and died in 1883.  According to Physics in Perspective, “Plateau dedicated himself passionately to the study of … soap membranes until 1844, when he gradually became blind.”  Thus for much of his career Plateau could … Continue reading →

Putting the Space Station Where You Want It

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Tonight I have a public program at my college’s observatory, which is located in a park in rural Indiana called South Harrison Park.  When putting together a schedule for the observatory, I try to find especially cool stuff around which to build programs.  Flyovers of the International Space Station (ISS) are always cool.  A night with a moon, planets, and an ISS flyover are great.  Thus, the night of October 12 seemed perfect for a program, because a quick look at the sky for that night using the Stellarium planetarium app shows the ISS passing through the evening sky, coming quite close to Saturn at 7:27 PM Eastern Time. But the above is the view Stellarium gives of the ISS from “Louisville, Kentucky”, latitude N 38° 15′ 15.26″, longitude W 85° 45′ 33.87″.  The ISS is not very high above Earth—roughly 250 miles.  That may seem like a lot, but it is not so much that a change of position … Continue reading →

God’s Work Revealed in the Tiny and the Creepy

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Visit the Vatican Observatory Faith and Science pages and you might come upon information about Maria Sybilla Merian (1647-1717), who saw the hand of God in things that make many people’s skin crawl.  In an introduction to one of her books she writes, Ever since my youth I have been engaged in the examination of insects. I began with silkworms in my native city of Frankfurt, but then, noticing that much more beautiful butterflies, both nocturnal and diurnal, emerged from caterpillars, I was moved to gather together all the caterpillars I could find and to make observations of their metamorphoses. For this reason I set aside my social life and devoted all my time to these observations and to improving my abilities in the art of painting, so that I could both draw individual specimens and paint them in lively colors. No doubt Merian stood out in her world!  She had two daughters who she sometimes recruited to assist her. … Continue reading →

The Copernican Revolution – Differently

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I once thought that the Copernican Revolution was about the modern scientific view of the universe displacing the old Earth-centered view.  Consider Neil deGrasse Tyson’s 2014 re-make of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” TV series, with its animated sequence about Giordano Bruno being condemned and burned by church officials for advocating that the stars were other suns, orbited by other worlds (if you have not seen the Bruno sequence, click here to watch it, and go to about the 16 minute mark).  This event has made Bruno a martyr to science in the eyes of some, since of course today science shows us that the stars are indeed other suns, orbited by other worlds.  Cosmos’s portrayal of Bruno has numerous flaws, not least of which is portraying Bruno’s opponents as a bunch of ugly orcs, but Cosmos got the basics right—Bruno and the modern scientific view against the old view. Or did it?  It turns out that, if you were a good … Continue reading →

Galileo’s Newly-Discovered Letter: The Scholarship is Published (re-run)

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This is a “re-run” of a post that originally ran in March.  At that time it was a “members only” post. Today marks one year since Nature published its article on Galileo’s letter, so I am re-running the post “open to all”. 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. The paper, titled “The reappearance of Galileo’s original Letter to Benedetto … Continue reading →

The Sun’s Many Strange Neighbors (re-run)

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This post originally ran in the summer of 2017. I’m re-running it in advance of a post that will appear in two weeks that will talk about Johannes Kepler’s ideas about the nature of stars. The table at right* shows the distance to and luminosity of the twenty stars closest to our solar system. Distance is measured in light years (meaning that if a star is 10 light years from Earth, then it would require 10 years to reach that star, travelling at the speed of light). Luminosity, or power output, is given in terms of the Sun’s output (so a star with the same power output as our Sun would have a luminosity of 1). The stars in this table are the solar system’s twenty nearest neighbors. Notice what a wimpy lot our neighbors are. Yes, there are some respectable stars among the bunch—obviously Sirius A, with 22 times (22x) the Sun’s power output, is a serious*~ star. Sirius … Continue reading →

The Lion King’s Sky

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I saw the new “Lion King” movie last month.  Whether you think it is a good movie or a bad movie, you would have to agree that it is an impressive bit of computer animation.  The artists at Disney worked hard to get so many details so realistic.  As I watched the movie, I could almost believe that animals can talk. So why did Disney put so little realism into the sky?  As an astro-nerd, I found myself scoffing and sneering at pretty much every sky scene.  For example, I think in one shot the sun rose straight up, as though Pride Rock was close to the equator (which makes sense).  But then in another scene, the sun rose at a noticeable angle—up and to the right, as though the location were significantly further north.  And I did not recognize any constellations among the stars in the movie sky. I can’t be sure about those two things.  I do not … Continue reading →

Religious Scientists on Vatican Observatory Faith and Science

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There is new thing on the Vatican Observatory Faith and Science archive!  We have added a new section—“Religious Scientists”.  We mean “religious scientists” in a broad sense: scientists who are people of faith, believers in God. There are two parts to this new section.  The first part is a listing of different scientists whose work is featured in the archive.  For each scientist, there is a link that takes you to the different entries in the archive related to that scientist.  Some of the scientists in the listing are well-known—Isaac Newton, for example.  Others are not so well known—William F. Rigge, S.J., for example. The second part is a simple listing of religious scientists.  Information about each scientist is limited.  However, the second part includes many more scientists compared to the first part. It is important to understand that both parts are listings of religious scientists, not saintly scientists.  Scientists are not always saintly.  Scientists are also often independent-minded and … Continue reading →