Category Archives: Diary

Across the Universe: Ordinary Time

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This entry is part 167 of 169 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 136 of 169 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 29 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 29 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 29 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 →

Proclaiming the Heavens

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This entry is part of 29 in the series Diary

Since February, our daily readership here at the Catholic Astronomer site has doubled. That’s the good news. However, the number of folks who are subscribers or member/supporters hasn’t doubled. A lot of people read this site via the Vatican Observatory Foundation Facebook page, which is great. But you may not realize that we depend on paying supporters of the blog to keep this site operating. We pay each of our bloggers – not much, but enough to maintain the principle that writers deserve an income, the laborer is worthy of a wage. (1 Timothy 5:18, for those Catholics in the audience who don’t know their scripture!) And there are other technical support costs. Only your donations can keep this operation moving. Of course, what I am hoping is that any donations above our costs (which, thankfully, we do have) can grow to become a major support for the work of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. It takes a lot of money … Continue reading →

Frye Fire: VATT Damage Assessment on June 27

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I was happy to report a few days ago that the news about the demise of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT) in a fire on Sunday June 18 had been exaggerated. The good people at the site informed me that the VATT appeared unharmed but I was still a little uneasy. I knew that there had been a lot of heat and even more smoke. The heat could have damaged the dome. If the dome’s roundness had been compromised, it would have lost its ability to rotate freely. If the smoke had deposited conductive soot on the electronic circuit boards and corrosive tar on the coated optical surfaces, it would have made us expend considerable resources on cleaning, testing, recoating and recommissioning. I feared that months of diligent work lay before us. The only way to restore my peace of mind was to hasten to the VATT and assess the damage. But how?  I made some preliminary arrangements to … Continue reading →

VATT Smoked but not Cooked in Frye Fire

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At 12:27 local time on Sunday June 18, Kevin Newton emailed this image from the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) building with the caption, “VATT is in trouble.” The photograph shows a red plume of fire in the direction where the VATT (Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope) ought to be. When I saw it, I was very nervous but I knew that things cannot be quite as bad as the picture suggested. Kevin’s email came to me via the microwave communications tower standing 15ft from the VATT building. ‘If the tower is OK,’ I kept telling myself, ‘then the VATT must be OK, too.’ … Continue reading →

Faith and Science: One Stop Shopping!

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This entry is part of 29 in the series Diary

We’re pleased to announce the latest outreach project of the Vatican Observatory Foundation: A Faith and Science resource site (click here!) The idea is to have a place where Catholic educators – and educated Catholics – can go to find links to materials all over the web dealing with a variety of topics on the broad issue of Faith and Science. This web site is not complete, of course, and probably never will be… new material is being posted (and being brought to our attention) all the time. In fact, when you go to the site you’ll notice a certain bias towards material that our own members of the Vatican Observatory, past and present, have prepared and posted on-line. Rather than describing it further, I encourage you to go explore the site itself. And if you have comments or suggestions, please let us know. However, there’s one point I do want to make here. Sites like these don’t happen for … Continue reading →

Should you (or someone you love) go to MIT?

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This entry is part of 29 in the series Diary

Today is “PI” day (written in American style, 3/14…) and MIT is holding a one day fundraiser… In honor of this day, this provides me with an excuse to post something I wrote for my Live Journal account a few years ago and which I get asked about from parents (and grandparents) of prospective students all the time. Of course the MIT I attended was nearly half a century back, but things haven’t changed all that much… Do I recommend MIT? Only if you are a very particular type of student. There is a reason why schools like MIT are so rare: because for most people, it is the wrong school to go to. MIT is not a place to find yourself. Because it is such an intense environment, it can be devastating to anyone who doesn’t already have a strong sense of who they are, and where they want to go. (Mind you, after MIT is finished with you, the person … Continue reading →

Five Reasons Why Clickbait Works

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This entry is part of 29 in the series Diary

There’s two opposing theories about posting stuff in the week between Christmas and New Years. On the one hand, everyone’s off having a good time and not paying attention to the internet. On the other hand, nobody else is posting anything so you have a better chance than usual of actually being noticed by the folks who do. It’s been a while since I have posted a diary on The Catholic Astronomer about this blog itself, so I am taking these off-days to do so. Since the self-referential title promised five points (I just made up the number five now, I have no idea how many points I’ll have) let me start numbering them. Even though we don’t charge you for reading it, this web site is not free. I pay (a pittance, admittedly) to our bloggers, and that money has to come from someplace. In addition we pay a standing fee to Cyrcle Systems for regular maintenance, etc. Some months … Continue reading →