Category Archives: Diary

ⓜ This week at the Specola (ⓜ = members only!)

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This entry is part 33 of 34 in the series Diary

We’ve been wondering how to get more Sacred Space members, and more members logging in… and one suggestion was to have “subscribers-only” posts available. But what to put in those posts? Over the next couple of months we’ll try out various kinds of content, to see which ones are most popular with our members. One genre which I will have here are “Diary” posts – “inside baseball” accounts of what’s happening at the Specola. This is my first attempt at such a post. 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 →

Across the Universe: Looking overhead

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This entry is part 181 of 180 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in January 2018 “What do you see when you look at the stars? Science, heaven, God?” the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire asked me in 2018. Does the sky look any different to a professional astronomer who is also a person of faith? The first thing I see when I look up at night is the beauty of the stars… just like anyone who can see the night sky.  But I do see more. My father, a US Army Air Corps navigator who once guided a wing of American bombers across the Atlantic to England in 1942, taught me the brighter navigation stars when I was a child. I’d also been given a wonderful book by the children’s writer H. A. Rey (better known for Curious George) that taught the constellations by turning the stars into connect-the-dot puzzles. Even today, whenever I see the stars I immediately start to identify old friends by name. … Continue reading →

Diary: Happy Birthday Katie!

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This entry is part 32 of 34 in the series Diary

Something I have come to understand, slowly but inevitably, is that astronomy is not about stars and planets; it is about people and how they (we) study those stars and planets. After all, one cannot understand the science of Galileo without knowing Galileo the person. He only was able to recognize what he saw in his telescope (he wasn’t the first to look) because he had an interest and training in art; he was only able to communicate it to the point that it led to a change in how humanity understood the situation (he wasn’t the first to try) because he had a passion for the Italian language and literature. If he had been a different person, our science would have had a different history… perhaps asking different questions, and accepting different answers as satisfactory. This blog has always been about people. And so I want to highlight someone here whose wonderful personality has been crucial to our success. … Continue reading →

Three paths to enlightenment. Or something. (Only one costs you money!)

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This entry is part 31 of 34 in the series Diary

This has been a great year for the Vatican Observatory Foundation, in a lot of ways. We’ve made major upgrades to the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope. We supported a fantastically successful Vatican Observatory Summer School, the 16th that we’ve run since the program began in 1986. The Jesuits and our adjunct astronomers have given hundreds of public talks and appeared in dozens of newspapers and media interviews. (I even got my picture on the front page of the New York Times!) Our Faith and Astronomy digital library is now up and running, at it has already attracted nearly 50,000 views. And the Catholic Astronomer website is now followed by more than 8,000 subscribers. In terms of supporting the scientific and educational work of the Vatican Observatory, we’ve never done more. The one downside? We are running seriously short in fundraising.  How serious? Well… every year we make up a budget, and for 2018 we assumed that we’d be able to … Continue reading →

Three Ways to Spread What’s Going On…

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This entry is part 30 of 34 in the series Diary

I got an email recently from someone who’d read an interview of mine… Hi Br. Guy, I just came across this 2017 article. Your quote, “More scientists who are church-goers need to make their science known to their parishioners”  is something that I have contemplated over the years but wasn’t really sure about how to exactly go about it, do you have any suggestions? Good question, actually. Here’s how I answered him:     Great to hear from you! And good on you, to call my bluff about me saying what “somebody else” should be doing! So here are some thoughts off the top of my head… Then I sent the following: 1. Read and spread the word about our two web sites, The Catholic Astronomer and our Faith and Science resource site. 2. Get involved with groups already in existence in your parish, such as the CCD classes the Knights of Columbus your local parish Mens’ club if one exists Once you … Continue reading →

An “Across the Universe” never run: God’s action

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This entry is part 3 of 180 in the series Across the Universe

Sometimes I write columns for Across the Universe that, for various reasons, I decide not to submit. Here is one that I prepared in 2016 while attending the 2016 General Congregation. I decided to go with last week’s column instead… in part because with the topic below I would either have run short (as here, well below the typical 600 words) or I would have gone way too long… I have been participating in the 36th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, which finally closed on November 12 [2016]. It was an odd experience… half, six-week-long retreat; half, six-week-long faculty meeting. As you can imagine, I didn’t get a whole lot of science done during that time. But that’s not to say that I wasn’t thinking about science. It wasn’t particular projects waiting for me back at the office that held my attention, though, but rather the the whole enterprise of being a scientist. The fact is, for all … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Ordinary Time

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This entry is part 174 of 180 in the series Across the Universe

This column was first published in The Tablet in June, 2006, and re-run in 2015 here. The coincidence of the church calendar it mentions is also true this year, 2018… the text has been slightly altered to align it with 2018’s calendar. The work detailed here outlines what I was doing twelve years ago. An update appears at the end of the column.) Next weekend marks an unusual event in our recent Church calendar: a Sunday in “Ordinary Time.” What with Lent and the Easter season, and then the special Feasts of the Trinity and Corpus Christi, Ordinary Time has been rare lately. But I’ve been celebrating “ordinary time” at the Vatican Observatory as well. Unusual for me, I’ve actually been able to manage a month’s uninterrupted work in my laboratory. My airline’s frequent flyer program tells me I’ve flown over 27,000 miles since the last ordinary Sunday before Lent: an observing run at the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, a meeting … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Reaping the Whirlwind

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This entry is part 143 of 180 in the series Across the Universe

The year 2017 has been one of many destructive hurricanes. Five years earlier, I endured Hurricane Sandy. That month I ran a diary of my experiences in The Tablet. This column first ran in The Tablet in November 2012 October 29: I’ve been staying at the home of my friends Dan and Léonie in Long Island, New York, since Friday afternoon. My plan had been to visit over the weekend before flying back to Rome. Then Hurricane Sandy arrived. We lost power about 4:30 pm on Monday, and spent the evening in the dark, playing various “Twenty Questions” games. October 30: Their home was spared, but three trees fell on houses nearby, and another has blocked the end of their street. The airport is flooded, all flights canceled. This part of Long Island was hit by Hurricane Irene last year; everyone here is already well-rehearsed for surviving a hurricane. Dan’s university has its own power planet, so we can charge our cell … Continue reading →

Galileo’s Rivals

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This entry is part of 34 in the series Diary

Our very own Chris Graney has a new book! It’s called Mathematical Disquisitions: The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo published by the University of Notre Dame Press. Plenty of people have translated the works of Galileo, and many more have read them – in Italy, they’re considered an essential part of Italian literature and kids read them when they are in high school. But how many people have actually read the works of Galileo’s rivals, especially those whom he specifically calls out in his writings? Chris Graney has… and here he translates and comments on one of the most interesting of these, by Locker. To quote the blurb on the Notre Dame Press site: Mathematical Disquisitions: The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo offers a new English translation of the 1614 Disquisitiones Mathematicae, which Johann Georg Locher wrote under the guidance of the German Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner. The booklet, an anti-Copernican astronomical work, is of interest in large part because Galileo … Continue reading →

Bob Garrison (1936-2017)

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A noted astronomer and great friend of the Vatican Observatory, Bob Garrison, died on August 13. The Specola’s Fr. Chris Corbally, a friend and close collaborator of Dr. Garrison, writes: After 81 years of life, and over 21 years of Parkinson’s, Bob Garrison died last Sunday morning. Today I received this obituary, written by his son, Lee, with input from his partner, Susanna. There’s a mention of how he treasured being a VOSS’ 90 faculty person. You will remember that he was my doctoral mentor at the University of Toronto, during which he became a lasting friend and collaborator. The Vatican Observatory hosted a Festschrift for Bob in Tucson in 2002, a few years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Yes, Bob had great regard for VO! I was able to congratulate him for reaching his 80th birthday when I visited him and Susanna in Toronto last November. His obituary reads: Dr. Robert (Bob) Frederick Garrison Born in 1936 to … Continue reading →

Diary: Where does the money go? (Part 2)

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This entry is part of 34 in the series Diary

In a previous post, I noted that the Vatican Observatory Foundation (which sponsors this blog) has to raise about $800,000 a year to cover its commitments, and at the moment we are running very much behind. On the order of $300,000 a year behind, to be exact. That’s… distressing. What do we plan to do about it? Lots of things, but one in particular concerns you, the readers of this blog. The Catholic Astronomer has been around for about three years, and every year our readership is doubled and our support has likewise increased. Let’s just give an overview of where we are as of the end of July, 2017: We have 584 people who subscribe to our free email notification whenever there is a new posting. In addition, we publicize these on the Foundations’s Facebook site (just under 3,900 followers), and on our Vatican Observatory twitter site (6,600 followers) and the Foundation twitter site (1,400 followers). We get on … Continue reading →

Diary: Where does the money go? (Part I)

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This entry is part of 34 in the series Diary

In a recent post, I put out a short beg for folks to actually subscribe at $10 a month (more if you want!) and keep this blog, and the Foundation, going. This has brought up, quite rightly, a question about where exactly this money goes. The first item, of course, is to pay for the cost of this blog itself. At the moment, that’s covered. But the bigger goal is to have surplus from this funding go to support the Vatican Observatory Foundation and its works. What is it that the Foundation does? If you want to know what the Vatican Observatory Foundation has been up to lately, click here for a pdf of our most recent newsletter. What about the details of our funding? Where does it come from, where does it go? That’s covered in our annual report, (click here). The numbers in the annual report are the accountant’s numbers, which is different from actual cash flow. For one … Continue reading →