The Pope and the Telescope – not seeing much
We approach the 49th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. On the Vatican Observatory Faith and Science site you will find this cool video (click here) of Pope Paul VI at the V.O. at the time of the landing, trying his hand at the eyepiece of a V.O. telescope and giving a public statement on the significance of the landing. I do many public programs at my college’s observatory, and I think it is pretty clear that, at least at the moment shown in the video, Pope Paul was not getting a satisfactory view of the moon through that eyepiece. Notice how he squints and tries to keep one eye closed. Lots of people need some help in seeing through a telescope. When an inexperienced observer is going to use a telescope, it is good to select an eyepiece that is easy to look through. No doubt that telescope he was looking through was used for research, not public … Continue reading →
Lunar Eavesdropping: Two Men, a Radio, and Apollo 11 (Part II)
As noted in the last post, in a year from now we will be celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and I am hoping that those celebrations will include recognition of a unique accomplishment that is part of the Apollo 11 story but that is widely unknown: the work of Larry Baysinger, a man from my home town of Louisville, Kentucky, who independently detected signals from the Apollo 11 astronauts as they walked on the lunar surface. Last week’s post introduced Baysinger and Glenn Rutherford, the reporter (and future editor of the Archdiocese of Louisville’s newspaper) who recorded the project for posterity—both of whom I was fortunate enough to meet, four decades later. And, four decades later, Baysinger still had the reel-to-reel tape recordings that he had made. He transferred the salvageable sections of the tape to digital format. You can listen to his recording and compare it to NASA’s own recording here: Some years later, … Continue reading →
Lunar Eavesdropping: Two Men, a Radio, and Apollo 11 (Part I)
In a year from now we will be celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.* With luck, those celebrations will include recognition of a unique accomplishment that is part of the Apollo 11 story but that is widely unknown: the work of Larry Baysinger—a man from my home town of Louisville, Kentucky—who independently detected signals from the Apollo 11 astronauts as they walked on the lunar surface. Baysinger’s accomplishments were recorded and promptly published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, by another Louisvillian by the name of Glenn Rutherford, who later went on to be editor of the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Louisville, The Record. Rutherford was a 23-year-old reporter for the Courier-Journal, and his article about Baysinger was published under the headline “Lunar Eavesdropping: Louisvillians hear moon walk talk on homemade equipment”. Baysinger was a technician for Louisville’s WHAS 840 AM radio, and only a few years older than Rutherford. The story garnered some attention for Baysinger … Continue reading →
Recent Research with the VATT (Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope)
For most of its 125+ years of existence, The telescopes of the Vatican Observatory (V.O.) were located exclusively on Vatican territory, either in Vatican City itself or, starting in the 1930’s, at the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. However, in the early 1990’s the V.O. built a telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona, where the skies are much darker and clearer than they are around Rome. This is the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, or VATT. The name “Advanced Technology” refers to the VATT being one of the first telescopes to be built using a radically compact design and a new technique of telescope-building—things which since then have become much more common in big telescopes. The VATT is of course not in Vatican territory, and while it is staffed by V.O. astronomers, most of its operating funds come from private sources—such as you, O Reader of The Catholic Astronomer (please click here to support the VATT and the sorts of … Continue reading →
An Airplane and the Vatican Observatory
This is just a fun little post to show off some pretty scenery. The video below was taken by yours truly, from atop the papal palace at Castel Gandolfo, site of one of the telescopes of the Vatican Observatory. Castel Gandolfo overlooks Lago Albano, a volcanic lake. A firefighting plane just happened to be practicing on the lake at the time, making an already spectacular scene just all the more interesting. (That’s Br. Guy talking about the plane in the first part of the video; I was shooting the video for my students, so you will hear me addressing them, too.) Scroll down below the video for a nice still shot of the plane. Pretty cool stuff, huh? … Continue reading →
An Interesting Selection of Women in Science (From the Vatican Observatory Faith and Science Pages)
For a while now I have been editing the Vatican Observatory Faith and Science (VOFS) pages, and that has been an interesting and rewarding task. Editing the VOFS has really provided insight into the breadth of people who have contributed to the scientific endeavor (keeping in mind that there is no doubt that not everyone has had the same access to the world of science). Professionally speaking, it has helped me to have at my fingertips info to use to engage my students who might think that science is a “dead white guys” enterprise. Here is a list of some of the interesting women who have entries in the VOFS pages. Note that the first few all pertain to a flowering of women and science that occurred in Italy under Pope Benedict XIV, a period in history that I knew nothing about until I started editing the VOFS. Laura Maria Caterina Bassi of Bologna “Laura Maria Caterina Bassi (1711-1778) of … Continue reading →
Galileo on the decree of the Congregation of the Index: It’s Ingoli’s Fault! (re-run)
(This is a “re-run” of a post that originally ran in March 2016.) What a time to come on board the Catholic Astronomer blog with the purpose of writing about topics in the history of astronomy! Ten days ago I wrote about how it had been four hundred years since, on February 24, 1616, a committee of consultants for the Roman Inquisition assessed the heliocentric system as being “foolish and absurd in philosophy.” And now today it has been four hundred years since, on March 5, 1616, the Congregation of the Index (the office charged by the pope with licensing and censoring books) issued a public decree which stated that the doctrine of Earth’s motion was false, and was contrary to scripture, and that to prevent the Copernican opinion from making further progress against Truth, circulation of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus was to be suspended until offending material could be edited out of it. Why did the Inquisition consultants state that … Continue reading →
The Popular Creation Story…
I am pleased to announce a little history of science publication. It is not a scholarly article, but one for a broader readership. It appeared in issue 60 of Nautilus magazine (freely available) just two days ago. Check it out. I can’t claim credit for the artwork (which I borrowed for this post) or the title—they come from Nautilus. The rest, however, is mine. Click here to read. … Continue reading →
The Rise of Sasquatch
People are believers. A couple of years ago National Geographic did a story with the headline “The World’s Newest Major Religion: No Religion”, which addressed how “the religiously unaffiliated, called ‘nones’, are growing significantly”. However, even the religiously unaffiliated are often believers. Many of my Astronomy 101 students are ‘nones’. When the class touches on early ideas about how the universe works, ideas that might involve religious concepts such as the god Helios being the reason for the rising and setting of the sun, students will often volunteer their lack of belief in any religion, and marvel at how people ever relied on ideas like Helios to explain the world. But when the class moves into the subject of intelligent life on other worlds (where we learn about the historical and scientific track record regarding the idea of intelligent extraterrestrials—and it is not a good track record, as I have recently discussed at length) a surprising number of students reveal … Continue reading →
Astronomy in Art & Architecture: The Barlow Orrery
A giant nineteenth-century orrery that mechanically reproduces the motions of the inner solar system can be found at the Center for Kentucky History in Frankfort, Kentucky. The orrery—also known as a planetarium—was created to be a teaching tool by Thomas Barlow (1791-1865) of Lexington, Kentucky, with his son Milton. However, it is also a work of astronomical art! I actually learned about the Barlow from Jamie Day, a professor of physics at Transylvania University in Lexington. He gave a talk on it at a conference at the University of Notre Dame in July of 2017.* This is the second grand-scale piece of astronomical art in Frankfort, Kentucky that I have featured in the Astronomy in Art and Architecture series (click here for the whole series)—the other being the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Thus Frankfort, Kentucky’s Capital, is definitely worth a visit if you are interested in astronomy. *The title and abstract of Prof. Day’s talk at the University of Notre … Continue reading →
Isaac Newton, the Godly Man – Will he engage my students?
Imagine that you heard someone make some broad general statement about basketball players: “basketball players take no interest in philosophy”, perhaps. And, imagine further that the notion that basketball players avoid philosophy is in fact accepted as conventional wisdom. But then you find several books on philosophy written by LeBron James and Larry Bird. Or suppose you heard some general statement made about musicians—that cellists don’t eat hamburgers, maybe—and suppose that the conventional wisdom is in fact that cellists don’t eat hamburgers. But then you see photos of Yo-Yo Ma and Mstislav Rostropovich munching Big Macs and Whoppers, respectively. Those general statements about basketball players and cellists are imaginary. However, perhaps you have actually heard this general statement: “scientists are not religious”. And maybe: “the best scientists are definitely not religious”. In some circles, that seems to be the conventional wisdom. In 2017 Oxford University Press released a new book by Robert Iliffe entitled Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds … Continue reading →
The Inquisition on Copernicus, February 24, 1616: A Little Story About Punctuation (re-run)
(This is a “re-run” of a post that originally ran in February 2016.) “Scientifically untenable and theologically heretical.” That is how a committee of consultants for the Roman Inquisition assessed the heliocentric theory four hundred years ago today, on February 24, 1616—or, that is how the historian Maurice Finocchiaro paraphrases their assessment. Well, there is an interesting story about exactly what it was the consultants said. Read various secondary sources and you will find differing translations of the consultants’ report, which was in Latin. For example, Finocchiaro translates the part of the report in which the consultants assess the heliocentric proposition that the sun is the immobile center of the world as All said that this proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and the … Continue reading →