Category Archives: Priests and Religious of Science

How a Jesuit Astronomer and His Student beat Isaac Newton to a Key Idea by more than 50 Years (re-run)

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This is a “re-run” of a post that originally ran on May 25, 2019. I am rerunning it because the Journal for the History of Astronomy, which in February 2019 published the research that this post is based on, has made the published research available, free of charge.  So CLICK HERE and then download a PDF of the original paper.  You will see that it is pretty similar to this post. In 1614, well before Isaac Newton was even born, a German Jesuit astronomer named Christoph Scheiner and his student, Johann Georg Locher, developed an explanation for how the Earth could orbit the sun.  Earth, they said, was like a massive ball, perpetually falling toward the sun.  They discussed this in their 1614 book Disquisitiones Mathematicae de Controversiis et Novitatibus Astronomicis, or Mathematical Disquisitions Concerning Astronomical Controversies and Novelties (recently translated by yours truly, and published by the University of Notre Dame Press—click here).  This was Locher’s thesis for his degree … Continue reading →

Specola Guestbook | December 10, 1924: José Algué S.J.

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This entry is part 79 of 84 in the series Specola Guestbook

Since its founding in 1891, many people have passed through the doors of the Vatican Observatory.  A quick perusal of our guestbook reveals several Names, including Popes, Nobel laureates, astronauts, actors, and saints. Today’s guestbook entry is from December 10, 1924, when José Algué made a visit. Next to his name, Fr. José Maria Algué S.J. (1856-1930) wrote, “Manila, Philippine Islands.” Algué was a meteorologist at the Observatory of Manila. He invented several instruments for the meteorological and seismographical observations. Most notable of these is a barocyclonometer, a type of fluidless barometer adapted for the prediction of storms.  He invented this instrument in 1897, and it was adopted by US Navy for use on its North Atlantic fleet in 1914. Algué also invented a nephoscope (for measuring movement and altitude of clouds) and a microseismograph.  

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ⓜ New Research: Galileo, Jesuit Astronomers, and Star Sizes

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(ⓜ = members only!) Research is done at the Vatican Observatory.  Some of that research is done by yours truly.  In this post, I share some of the nuts and bolts of that research with Sacred Space Astronomy readers, and especially with subscribers, as those readers who are also subscribers actually help fund the operation of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, or VATT, on Mt. Graham in Arizona, and its associated programs. My main area of research these days is the history of astronomy; that’s been my main area for roughly 15 years now.  Currently I am working on a paper about three astronomers from the 17th century.  These are Galileo Galilei, who of course you know, and the Jesuit astronomers Andreas Tacquet and Christoph Scheiner.  Scheiner you might know from his battle with Galileo over sunspots.  Tacquet you probably have never heard of. I heard of Tacquet thanks to the English scientist Robert Hooke, who worked in the late … Continue reading →

Go Observe Clavius

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Christophorus Clavius Christophorus Clavius lived between the years 1537 and 1612. He would never have imagined that a crater named for him on the moon would be global news in October 2020. When I drew this very large walled plain back in 2008 all I knew about it was that it was named after a man who was a mathematician/astronomer. This week however with Clavius being in the news I had to have a closer look out of curiosity. It was time to revisit my drawing and pay attention to this area on the moon and plan to go observe Clavius once again. A flying discovery NASA’s Sofia telescope has discovered the signature of water H2O on the moon in the area of Clavius. Of course, this news supports the ARTEMIS mission planned for more exploration of our moon in the future. It also supports the SOFIA flying observatory and its multifaceted set of tasks. ESA also have future plans for … Continue reading →

The Ideas Behind Black Holes

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Black holes are all in the news, with the Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez, for their work on black holes.  The Faith & Science post from this past Wednesday was about Juan Martín Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University; his area of study is black holes.  The video below features Maldacena talking about his work. Roger Penrose was at the Vatican Observatory in 2017 as part of its “Black Holes, Gravitational Waves and Space-Time Singularities” conference.  Fr. Gabriele Gionti, S.J., who is a scientist at the V.O., sent me the pictures below of Penrose at that conference. Since you are reading Sacred Space Astronomy, you have probably heard black holes mentioned many times.  But, have you heard a good explanation of what they are?  “Cool” things like black holes tend to be talked about a lot, and perhaps explained not so much—indeed, sometimes they seem to be … Continue reading →

I got to see Fr. Angelo Secchi’s telescope at the Cincinnati Observatory

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If you peruse the Vatican Observatory’s 2019 Annual Report you will come across the book Decoding the Stars: A Biography of Angelo Secchi, Jesuit and Scientist, by VO Adjunct Scholar Ileana Chinnici, which was published in 2019 by Brill. It is a really nice book that I can recommend to all readers of “Sacred Space Astronomy.” I am not the only one who likes this book. It was recently awarded the Donald E. Osterbrock Book Prize for Historical Astronomy by the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society (click here for more information on the award). Secchi was a pioneering astrophysicist—one of the first to study and classify stars by means of their spectra. Secchi built an observatory in Rome on the roof of St. Ignatius church. The church was built to support a large dome, but the dome was never constructed, meaning the building could solidly support an observatory. Chinnici writes: Thanks to a family legacy left by … Continue reading →

Talking to Your Dog… or to E.T.

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This post comes from a “Science in the Bluegrass” column I wrote for The Record, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Louisville, Kentucky.  That column in turn came from a series of posts I wrote for Sacred Space Astronomy in early 2018, so if you have been reading this blog for a while, you will recognize the general idea here.   Extraterrestrials! They are an idea from science whose impact on popular culture has been huge. Think of those big movie franchises that involve beings from other worlds: Marvel, Star Wars, Star Trek, and more. Extraterrestrials have not always been popular. Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher from before Christ, reasoned that Earth is the only world that exists. No other worlds. No extraterrestrials. Aristotle influenced many Greco-Roman, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers. However, in 1277, the bishop of Paris officially condemned Aristotle’s idea that Earth could be the only world. An omnipotent God, the bishop said, could make any number … Continue reading →

Vatican Observatory Photometry and “The Vilnius Connection”

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“Forty Years of Photometry.” That is what is on the cover of the Specola Vaticana/Vatican Observatory’s 2019 Annual Report. If you have not had a look at the report, click here and read through it (and to see Annual Reports going back years, click here). The two gentlemen on the cover are Fr. Richard P. Boyle, S.J. (at right) and Fr. Robert Janusz, S.J. And that cover, and those gentlemen, have a connection to my “origins story” with this Sacred Space Astronomy blog and the V.O. The Annual Report’s main article starts off by noting that, Just as this year the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, so here at the Specola we mark a significant anniversary: 40 years since the pioneering publication of Father Martin McCarthy and his collaborators on stellar photometry, which laid the groundwork for what has become a major thrust of research at the Vatican Observatory. In that paper, Fr. McCarthy described … Continue reading →

Science and Water, Then and Now

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You find science everywhere.  During the early eighteenth century Spanish Franciscans established a series of missions along the San Antonio River in what is now the U.S. state of Texas.  They ministered to the native Coahuiltecan people who lived there.  The San Antonio Missions are today active Catholic churches in the Archdiocese of San Antonio, while also being part of the San Antonio Missions National Park, and a UN World Heritage Site.  Thus, the missions are still there.  And, as a film that introduces visitors to the San Antonio Missions emphasizes, so are the Coahuiltecans who built the missions with the Franciscans; their descendants live all over the area. One of the missions, Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purisima Concepción de Acuña, appeared in this blog last year (click here for that post) because the sun illuminates that church in an interesting way every Feast of the Assumption.  However, as I noted in that post, while arranging that sort of … Continue reading →

Astronomy in Art & Architecture: R. A. Rosenfeld’s Astronomical History Christmas Cards

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Greetings, Readers of Sacred Space Astronomy!  Check out the astronomical art below.  These are cards made by Randall A. Rosenfeld, who is the archivist for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.  I’ve been fortunate enough to be on Randall’s Christmas mailing list for some years now, and have built up this small collection of original astronomical artwork as a result.  He graciously gave the OK for me to share them with Sacred Space Astronomy readers.  These scans do not look nearly as good as the originals, because the originals feature cool stuff like stars colored with metallic ink.  A scan just will not capture that sort of thing. Many of these illustrations are based on material found in historical books on astronomy.  I have included links to the originals in many cases.  Click on those links if you have time.  I think that you will be glad that you did. The card above is the most recent one Randall has … Continue reading →

Religious Scientists | Fr. Athanasius Kircher S.J. (1602-1680): Jesuit Polymath

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This entry is part 15 of 15 in the series Religious Scientists of the Catholic Church

Athanasius Kircher lived at a time when a wealth of information was coming to Rome from the missions — many of them Jesuit-run — around the world.  Missionaries were documenting new plants, animals, cultures, and natural phenomena.  Stationed in Rome himself, Kircher collected these reports and artifacts from abroad and corresponded with scientists and academics throughout Europe.  His writings — more than 40 texts — compile, report, and expand upon many different fields from linguistics to Egyptology to paleontology to magnetism and more.  Living at the end of the age of Renaissance polymaths, he has been called “the last man who knew everything.” His scientific contributions were largely hit-or-miss, many of them having been corrected or negated by later findings.  Often, historians have emphasized these failures to paint a picture him as anything from a well-meaning but failed scientist to an outright charlatan.  This bias, however, fails to recognize the value of his overall body of work.  More recently, some … Continue reading →

A Tale of Two Cities (and two churches, and two hotels, and an observatory)

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In 1934 Our Lady of Lourdes Church in West Baden Springs, Indiana was deemed structurally unsound, was pulled down, and was not rebuilt. A forest grows now where the church once stood. Revolving around Lourdes and its sister church, Our Lady of the Springs (still standing a mile or so down the road in the town of French Lick), is an interesting story about building a world we can live with. This story does involve some elements of what we usually think of as science—a Jesuit-run astronomical observatory is part of the story!—but it is mostly about science as considered more broadly: science as the process of looking carefully at the world around us and trying to measure it and to understand it and the rules by which it works, and to come up with ideas about it, on its terms, not on ours. It is a fascinating story, and one that may give us some good ideas for the … Continue reading →