Smart Phones from Eels

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Have you used electrical technology today?  Something with a battery?  Something that sent information over wires?  Or wirelessly?  You surely used a smart phone, or the internet, or something plugged in to a wall outlet.  Perhaps you just listened to the radio. Where did this technology come from? The electric battery, so important to so many devices, started it all.  Alessandro Volta created the first one around the year 1800.  Studying electric eels led him to the principles of battery construction.  Volta’s battery (and yes, the term “voltage” comes from his name) was the first good way to generate a steady flow of electricity.  With it, electrical technology took off.  With batteries, people could communicate rapidly, by sending electrical signals over wires.  The telegraph was the start of that; now we have the internet.  We have electric cars, thanks to improvements both in batteries and in the electric motors that move those cars.  Michael Faraday’s discovery that electricity and magnetism … Continue reading →

Through clear glass.

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I would argue that the gradual improvement of glass as a medium spurred on astronomical progress as much as the ingenuity of astronomers. Since Hellenistic times, glass was all but taken for granted. Sure, it was expensive early on, but it was everywhere. Starting with beads, then mosaic tile and vessels. By the 1st century B.C. The Roman Empire had developed fairly consistent recipes for glass manufacturing. The apex of this was the development of blown glass. More on why this is important later. I could write pages on Roman glass, but I’ll just leave this here: The Portland Vase, layered and hand cut between 5 and 25 A.D. After the Empire collapsed some 300 years later, Europe was losing the ability to manufacture glass. The local masters were dying out, and the Venetians were clamping down hard on their secrets. They had also clamped down on the supply of natron, the flux used in Roman glass making.  They inherited … Continue reading →

Transit of Mercury CHEOPS and Exoplanets

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Drawing Yes, indeed I felt lucky to see the transit of mercury on November 11th. Black clouds full of heavy rain were in constant supply all morning. My PST telescope and drawing materials were in and out in the hope of a break in the weather. It was my intention to use the drawing to help explain the transit of Mercury, CHEOPS and Exoplanets. As you can see from the drawing above (which is not rotated) I got my first view of the tiny planet at 12:51. I sketched one black dot on top of my previously drawn solar disc. Then the rain bucketed down like rods with a big wind attached. Next chance came at 13:33 a second black dot added to the effort. Then it rained cats and dogs till 14:26 when my final opportunity gave me a third mercury dot to add to the sketch.  Most Irish observers had a similar story and images of this unique … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Eye Candy

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This entry is part 96 of 187 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in November 2008; we first published it here in 2016 Most people think that we astronomers spend all our nights looking through telescopes at beautiful sights in the sky. The truth, of course, is far more mundane. Most of our days are spent in offices staring at computer screens. And even the time spent at the telescope (for me maybe twice a year, five nights at a stretch) are spent in a control room staring at a computer screen… all night, 3000 meters up a mountain. Our targets last month [October 2008] at the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope in eastern Arizona were Centaurs, comet-like bodies whose eccentric orbits carry them from well beyond Neptune to the regions of Saturn or Jupiter. My Arizona and Oklahoma colleagues and I would wake up noon, have breakfast, do a few chores, answer e-mails; then at about 4:30 pm we’d open up the telescope dome and begin … Continue reading →

In the Sky This Week – November 19, 2019

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This entry is part 123 of 125 in the series In the Sky This Week

In last week’s session of my after-school club, the Endeavour Space Academy, I ran the students through a very quick tour of the solar system using both NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System app, and the NASA Solar System Exploration website. Only a couple of the students knew anything at all about the solar system, so I covered the most important points in the 25 minutes available… I wish I had several more hours to cover everything! I asked the students if any of them knew about the Earth’s mid-ocean rifts – one said they were covering that in science class. I asked the student if she heard about the ecosystems that exist around the mid-ocean rifts, and extremophiles? I talked about the students about the possibility that similar sub-ocean rift systems might exist on several of the icy moons in the outer solar system, and what that might mean for the search for life. Saturn appears high above the … Continue reading →

The Story Telling Universe.

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Making the commitment to become good at astrophotography has become more life giving than I could have imagined. At the beginning, I thought I could just specialize in star photography and that would be that. However, I began to realize that in order to take good pictures of the Milky Way, I must first understand the difference between a good and bad picture. A constant theme I encounter when reading professional photographers is the necessity to take pictures that tell stories. At first, the necessity to tell stories through images felt a little awkward, thinking that all I wanted to do is take “pretty pictures.” However, the more I thought about it the more I realized the difference between taking a picture and capturing a moment. Any picture can tell you a story as long as you know how to “read” the image. The key to good story telling through photography is that there needs to be a universally understood … Continue reading →

Specola Guestbook: April 20, 1911 – George C. Comstock

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This entry is part 22 of 24 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 April 20, 1911, when George C. Comstock made a visit. Next to his name, George Cary Comstock (1855-1934) wrote, “Madison, Wis. Washburn Observatory.” He was the director of Washburn Observatory (part of the University of Wisconsin – Madison) from 1887 until his retirement in 1922. As an astronomer, he mostly studied stellar aberration, atmospheric refraction, and the proper motion of double stars. He was a founding member of the American Astronomical Society in 1899 and was a coauthor of its constitution. He served as its first secretary, and in 1925 was elected president. In 1899 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences.   … Continue reading →

Illuminating North America! (or, Anna and Fernando Find a Star)

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I am happy to re-introduce to readers of Sacred Space Astronomy to guest blogger Fernando Comerón. He is an astronomer with the European Southern Observatory. He previously wrote about using one of the world’s best telescopes at ESO (click here for that post). This new post is about discovering a star. Here Fernando describes the process of making a discovery in astronomy. But he also describes something else. He describes the excitement of discovery—of being one of only two people to know something, even if maybe it is, as he says, something most people might not care much about. Fernando Comerón, 9 Sept 2019 Please have a look at these two images, of two nebulae that may be well known to you. The one on the left is the Orion Nebula, and the right one is the North America nebula. In astrophysical terms, both nebulae are what astronomers call “HII regions”. “HII” means that they are mainly composed of ionized … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Clouds of Unknowing

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This entry is part 47 of 187 in the series Across the Universe

  (This column first appeared in the Tablet in November 2006; we first ran it here in 2015) When she first knew me, I was a rabbi; Heidi played drums in the band. It was a production of Fiddler on the Roof at MIT, where I was a lecturer and she a student – in fact, she wound up taking a course from me. Six years later, I had entered the Jesuits and she, with a newly minted PhD, had a job at the Jet Propulsion Lab helping guide the Voyager spacecraft towards Neptune. Then Comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter, and she was the scientist in charge of the Hubble images of the event… In 2006, Dr. Heidi Hammel was in my classroom again, but this time as a lecturer. That year [2006] found me at Fordham University, in the Bronx, filling the Loyola Chair for visiting Jesuit scholars. It’s not far from where Dr. Hammel now lives and works. We’d run … Continue reading →

In the Sky This Week – November 12, 2019

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This entry is part 122 of 125 in the series In the Sky This Week

I hope you had better luck than I did seeing the transit of Mercury… a good portion of North America was shrouded in clouds – I got several inches of snow! Even the website I pointed readers to last week to view the transit online was not broadcasting due to clouds. I ended up watching it on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory’s (SDO) Eclipse website – clouds are never a problem for the SDO. Venus and Jupiter appear very low and Saturn appears  high in the southwestern sky after sunset this week over the week. Jupiter moves slightly towards the horizon, and Venus moves slightly southward toward Jupiter. By the beginning of next week Mercury returns, appearing low and Mars a bit higher above the eastern horizon before sunrise this week. If you are having trouble spotting Mercury, you can use Mars and the star Spica to star-hop in the general direction of Mercury. The Moon appears high in the sky at … Continue reading →

ⓜ Free Man in Paris… Diary of 12 November, 2019

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This entry is part 47 of 47 in the series Diary

I love Paris in November. It’s cool and uncrowded, and it feels like a real city not just a tourist site. I traveled there last week, via sleeper train with a private cabin: the introvert’s delight!   Our stats this month: As of today, we have 145 paid subscribers (two new subscribers since last month — thanks and welcome!) and 9347 people (about a 150 new ones!) who get notified of new postings. We continue to grow, but not nearly fast enough to keep us in business. (Our goal is to have a thousand paid subscribers… at this rate we’ll hit that goal around the year 2045; that at least will still be before my 100th birthday.) Please, tell more people about our site; and if you can, please subscribe at a rate of $10 a month (about the cost of a burger and fries) or $100 per year. So, while in Paris I ran into three famous authors, a … Continue reading →

The Transit of Mercury and The Catholic Church. The Story of Fr. Pierre Gassendi

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As I write this post, we are only minutes away from the transit of Mercury across the Sun (click this link from EarthSky for a little more information). It was my hope to do my first LiveStream on Sacred Space Astronomy, talking with you live about the transit from my rectory office, showing real time video from my small h-alpha telescope, and give you a presentation about the connection between this transit and the Catholic Priest, Pierre Gassendi. The reason I didn’t promote this little event was because Wisconsin is notorious for cloud cover at this time of year. And, as fate may have it, even though the Weather Channel claims the skies over my house are clear – It’s cloudy. Nevertheless, Sacred Space Astronomy has wonderful resources about Pierre Gassendi. Christopher Graney wrote a marvelous post about the rare books collection at the University of Louisville that includes Pierre Gassendi’s work, Institutio Astronomica juxta Hypotheses tam Veterum quàm Recentiorum. … Continue reading →