Category Archives: Fundraising

Fr. George Coyne “Virtual” Memorial

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We’ve already collected more than a dozen remembrances from people who knew and worked with Fr. Coyne on our Fr. Coyne memorial page. Many have mentioned what a wonderful person he was, how much they enjoyed working and talking with him. If you have memories of Fr. Coyne you’d like to share, please use this form. We’re about 20% of the way to our fundraising goal – thank you to everyone who has donated! Donations to the Fr. Coyne memorial fund are still being accepted, and will go towards the creation of a book with a selection of Fr. Coyne’s writings and the remembrances posted on our site. We were planning on having a memorial gathering for George at the University of Arizona back on St. Patrick’s day, but alas the coronavirus led to the shutdown of the University, so that event has been postponed at least until the fall. Meanwhile, however, Br. Guy has created a video to show at … Continue reading →

A Memorial for George

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We have set up a memorial page for Fr. George Coyne: click here, or type in www.VOFoundation.org/fr-george-coyne/ We have three goals for this memorial page. First, we want to provide a place where people can post their memories of Fr. George. Second, we want to help organize a memorial book which would include a selection of his writings and the memories posted at that site. And third, we want to raise enough money to let us publish that book and continue the work that George so loved: the science of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope the education of young astronomers, especially from the developing world the engagement with the public with our astronomy our vision of faith and science working together   Please take a look at that page, and contribute what you can, as you can. We’re hoping to raise a significant amount of money, and we already have one major gift to start things off, but we’ll also … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #19: Wheel goes round

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We’re running a membership drive this month – today is the last day – 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… this story is all on me. It was nearly 50 years ago (January, 1973) and two friends of mine and I had arranged to do an undergraduate research project during MIT’s January intersession (IAP), five nights observing the Moon at the Wallace Observatory outside of Boston. There we had access to a 16 inch aperture telescope, and a filter wheel photometer. Think of the photometer as a one-pixel electronic camera: a phototube with a phosphor at one end to turn light into electrons, which would be slowly accelerated down the length of the tube until they had enough energy to register as an electric current. Before the light hit … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #18: Proper disposal

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This entry is part 18 of 18 in the series Stupid astronomer

Tomorrow is the last day!! 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… So I can hear you asking, after yesterday’s tale of cyanide vented into the air conditioning system, what ever happened to that glass beaker of water and cyanide? The truth is, I don’t know. But according to the story I heard… after the guys on the roof were informed that the campus police were on their way to the roof, to check out the source of the building’s contamination, they quickly fled back to their lab, glass beaker of water with dissolved cyanide in hand. Now what to do? Well, if the Arizona heat would promote its evaporation, probably keeping the stuff cool would … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #17: Input/Output

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This entry is part 17 of 18 in the series Stupid astronomer

Almost over! 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… Yesterday we talked about the problems of getting rid of the gas in the absorption tube after its spectrum had been measured. Just piping it outdoors left a telltale red spot, so for the next gas the lab personnel decided to be more clever. Along with inorganic chemicals like the ones mentioned yesterday as possible constituents of Jupiter’s atmosphere, there were many organic molecules that might exist there; most of them presumably derived from broken-up and reassembled bits of simpler, more basic compounds such as HCN, better known as hydrogen cyanide. So the tube was dutifully filled with cyanide and the spectrum measured. Now, to get rid … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #16: The Great Red Spot

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This entry is part 16 of 18 in the series Stupid astronomer

Down to our last few entries! 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… These past few days, we’ve been talking about the gas tube that used to run through the Lunar Lab, a meter wide and hundreds of meters long, filled with various hideous gases that were thought to be found in planetary atmospheres; the idea was to run sunlight through the gas and measure the wavelengths that each gas would absorb. One gas in particular, thought to be responsible for the color of Jupiter’s Red Spot, was phosphine. Phosphine is one phosphorus atom surrounded by three hydrogen atoms; if you look at the periodic table of the elements you see that P is just … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #15: The importance of good optics

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This entry is part 15 of 18 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… We described yesterday the absorption tube that once upon a time ran the length of the Lunar Lab… a meter wide, several hundred meters long, filled with the sorts of gases that might be found in the atmosphere of Jupiter… scary stuff like phosphine, silane, hydrogen sulfide, not to mention various wicked organics that people like Carl Sagan touted as evidence of life but which were, in fact, quite toxic to most life. How did the residents of this building feel about sharing their space with several hundred cubic meters of this nasty stuff? Nobody talked about it… though it’s notable that the floor with the tube was otherwise … Continue reading →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #14: Waiting for the sun

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This entry is part 14 of 18 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 18 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 18 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 →

Stupid Astronomer Tricks #11: Flattening the field

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This entry is part 11 of 18 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 18 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 →