Diary

More or less weekly diaries from Br Guy

Galileo’s Rivals

Sacred Space Astronomy avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 11 of 63 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 →

Br. Guy’s Diary: January 9, 2015

Sacred Space Astronomy avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 12 of 63 in the series Diary

My plan is to post regular updates, about once a week I hope, on my current work and the doings at the Vatican Observatory. This might give the members of our Sacred Space an idea of what our day to day life is like. Let me know if you enjoy these entries! This week: revising Vesta (again), talking lots of stuff, and a return for Brother Tom. Science: The Vesta paper was revised, sent to my co-authors, revised by them, fixed by me, sent back to them… and there is one more set of fixes to make. But I fully intend to submit it to the journal tomorrow morning. Really. Meanwhile, Rich has spent this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, where he gave a paper. I picked him up at the airport this afternoon; with him is a colleague from Lithuania. They’ll be heading up to the VATT (our telescope) tomorrow. Talks: Along with sending some more material for … Continue reading →

Proclaiming the Heavens

Sacred Space Astronomy avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 13 of 63 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 →

Diary: Where does the money go? (Part 2)

Sacred Space Astronomy avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 14 of 63 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 →

Another meta-posting…

Sacred Space Astronomy avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 15 of 63 in the series Diary

I’ve just come back from a wonderful week at Notre Dame University’s Institute for Church Life, joining an all-star cast to talk about how science and religion can be taught in Catholic high schools. Naturally I spent no small amount of time bragging about this blog to the assembled high school teachers; I think what we have to offer here may well be the kind of content they’d enjoy seeing and sharing. And I’ve seen a nice upturn in our “hits” this week as a result; welcome! At the moment, we typically get 100 – 250 views a day, and I am delighted that these viewers – you – find our blog worth reading. But I would love to raise that number, by a lot. Surely a thousand or more visits a day ought to be possible? Surely on the internet there must be a thousand people who share our enthusiasm for space and our desire to blend together the science … Continue reading →

“Exploring the Big Questions of the Universe…”

Sacred Space Astronomy avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 16 of 63 in the series Diary

Last spring, Now You Know Media released a set of lectures by me about Galileo. Well, the’ve done it again! The newest set of lectures are titled “Exploring the Big Questions of the Cosmos with a Vatican Scientist”… and my friends at Now You Know tell me that it’s already become the best new seller of their catalog for the last 12 months. (Which means, I guess, that it’s now outselling my Galileo series; how dare I outsell myself!) I recorded these lectures in June, at a time that was particularly hectic for me: I was speaking in Canada, attending my province’s Congregation in Baltimore, and doing who knows what else. As a result, I have no memory of what I actually said in any of these talks. Who knows what odd comments and bad puns I came up with? In any event, here’s a table of contents: Does Science Need God? Scripture or Science? Is the Big Bang Compatible with a Creator … Continue reading →

2016 Calendars are available!

Sacred Space Astronomy avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 17 of 63 in the series Diary

  Every year, the Vatican Observatory Foundation publishes a calendar featuring fantastic astronomical images from amateurs around the world… and noting dates of particular interest to astronomers. They can be purchased online here… This year’s calendar is out, and it looks great. (OK, so as proofreader I missed a couple of glitches, which immediately made themselves obvious as soon as I opened up the printed version. Nothing as bad as a couple years ago when we got Galileo’s birthday wrong!) On the back, I always write a pithy little paragraph or two that nobody reads. As a freebie for readers of The Catholic Astronomer, here’s what I put there this year: A few years ago, a couple of cosmologists who styled themselves as atheists attempted to show that there was “no need for God” to start the universe, at the moment popularly known as the Big Bang. They proposed thatthat a quantum fluctuation in the zero-energy vacuum field of the … Continue reading →

Happy Hundredth, Mildred!

Sacred Space Astronomy avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 18 of 63 in the series Diary

I got an email from my friend (and fellow planetary scientist) Rick Binzel: “I just learned that Mildred Shapley Matthews (the lovable taskmaster and technical editor who drove the Space Science Series forward for decades) recently celebrated her 100th birthday.” Funny thing was, I was just telling someone about Mildred earlier that day. She was the editor of the University of Arizona Space Science series of books for many years. In fact, she edited my very first paper – a chapter in the Jupiter book – and did a fantastic job, making my prose much better and clearer. She was also the very first person I ever met at the University of Arizona. I arrived late on a Saturday night for the Jupiter conference that was about to begin (this was May, 1975) and, seeing that there would be a walking trip up Sabino Canyon on Sunday morning, I managed to find the ride and met her on the trail. She … Continue reading →

5 Amazing Astronomical Things about Choosing a New Jesuit General!

Sacred Space Astronomy avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 19 of 63 in the series Diary

This week, more than 200 Jesuits from around the world are gathering in Rome to elect a new Father General; you can read all about it here. But for readers of The Catholic Astronomer, I thought I would pass on five amazing things that you might not know… For the first time ever, the electors will consist not only of priests from each Jesuit province around the world but also six brothers, chosen from each continent. The representative brother from North America is, in fact… me. So, there will be at least one astronomer at the meeting. All the more reason to pray for all of us! (No fear I will get elected the new Father General — the leader has to be a priest, not a brother. (What’s the difference? Priests are ordained, brothers are not. I do not lead public prayer, say Mass, or do any of those other priestly functions. I am a layperson, who belongs to a religious … Continue reading →

Br Guy’s Diary: December 31, 2014

Sacred Space Astronomy avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 20 of 63 in the series Diary

My plan is to post regular updates, about once a week I hope, on my current work and the doings at the Vatican Observatory. This might give the members of our Sacred Space an idea of what our day to day life is like. Let me know if you enjoy these entries! This week: revising Vesta, talking Galileo, and voyages near and far. Science: The science on my agenda this month is to resubmit our paper on Vesta. For the past couple of years I have been working with a team of scientists in Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Russia and Japan to look over the likely internal structure of asteroid 4 Vesta in light of the new data we have gotten from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Our paper was written up and submitted in early September; the editors of the journal we sent it to, Icarus, passed it out to a couple of other scientists who checked it over for errors and other … Continue reading →

Faith and Science: One Stop Shopping!

Sacred Space Astronomy avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 21 of 63 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 →

Fan Mail Poetry

Sacred Space Astronomy avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 22 of 63 in the series Diary

I get fan mail now and then; but this one included a poem, which I thought I would share, just for the fun of it! Dr. Will Buckingham is a reader in Writing and Creativity at De Montfort University, in Leicester, England, adjacent to the River Soar. He’s the author of a number of books, both academic and fiction, including children’s books. He included this note: “I was rummaging through some old boxes prior to moving house, and I stumbled across a bunch of notebooks from something like ten years back. Leafing through, I found a short poem that I’d written having seen you talk at the science museum in Birmingham. A few days after the talk, if I remember rightly, I was teaching a writing class, and I was encouraging my students to write sonnets, so I weighed in and produced the attached poem. The title is ‘The Pope’s Astronomer’’. I’m more of a fiction/philosophy writer than a poet, but it … Continue reading →