Sgr A* - Sacred Space Astronomy

In the Sky This Week – April 21, 2020

Posted on April 21, 2020 by Bob TrembleyApril 21, 2020

This entry is part 144 of 158 in the series In the Sky This Week

I lost my brother Victor to COVID-19 on April 12th. Please, everyone take precautions and stay safe! The triple-planet conjunction of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn continues in the southeastern predawn sky. Venus, Aldebaran and Rigel form a temporary triangle asterism in the western sky at dusk. The Moon appears near Aldebaran on the evening of April 25th, and near Venus the next evening. The star Vega and the constellation Lyra appear above the northeastern horizon at midnight. The Moon is a waning crescent, visible low to the east before sunrise. The new Moon occurs on April 23rd. After April 23rd, the Moon will be a waxing crescent, visible toward the southwest in early evening. Moon News Made in isolation, depicting isolation. Here's how Earth looks from the Moon & how Moon looks from Earth, April 2020: showing accurate phases and rotations. CGI based on real NASA imagery, lunar topography (exaggerated for fun), using NASA data (see it 4K https://t.co/EQ2fdR0u95) pic.twitter.com/YwO6GG5B4D … Continue reading →

In the Sky This Week – August 13, 2019

Posted on August 13, 2019 by Bob TrembleyAugust 13, 2019

This entry is part 110 of 158 in the series In the Sky This Week

The past couple days have certainly been a “voyage of discovery” for me. It started when I saw this tweet showing a massive release of energy from the Milky Way’s central black hole: Sagittarius A*. For those who are interested in the details of our observations of Sgr A* this year (including this one), see our recently accepted paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Read the pre-print of the paper here: https://t.co/cqqinNSKxK — Tuan Do (@quantumpenguin) August 12, 2019 The outburst took place over the short span of two and a half hours! WOW and then some! I stopped everything I was doing and went upstairs to show my wife, who also said WOW! I showed the tweet to some members of the Warren Astronomical Society at last Sunday’s Perseid Party at Stargate Observatory – they said WOW too… and then they cajoled me into presenting something about it at the W.A.S. meeting Thursday night – so go me! Dr. Do … Continue reading →

Joel Hopko August 6, 2020 at 9:23 am on ⓜ Science and miraclesThanks for the references I will follow up. Joel
Br. Guy Consolmagno August 6, 2020 at 7:59 am on ⓜ Science and humilityYes, exactly! Which is to say, it’s why we don’t try to do science entirely on our own. I am reminded of an old American folksong (I am of the folkie generation) that had a line about “finding Jesus on your own,” which sounded to my ears much like trying...
Br. Guy Consolmagno August 6, 2020 at 7:56 am on ⓜ Science and miraclesThanks for the kind words! Back in the 1990s, the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences sponsored a series of workshops with theologians and scientists on the general topic of “Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action” and the 1999 conference was on Neuroscience and the Person...
Joel Hopko August 6, 2020 at 6:47 am on ⓜ Science and miraclesBr. Guy -- Wonderful summary and meditation. It seems to me that the interaction of consciousness and quantum phenomena -- while not even minimally understood -- bears much interest for the cognitive scientist, the epistemologist and the mystic. I look forward to many such discussions. Joel
Richard Gabrielson August 4, 2020 at 7:40 pm on ⓜ Science and humility"That’s why you constantly test your ideas with experiments, and then test your experiments with better theories." Yes, and that's why we submit our ideas, theories and results to peer review!
Stan Sienkiewicz August 3, 2020 at 7:01 pm on ⓜ The August Full Moon Meetup!Please tell Fr. Jean-Baptiste Kikwaya Eluo it was a pleasure meeting him today at our Full Moon Meetup. I learned a great deal about the way of classifications. Also, his remarks about Parish support was wonderful to hear as a lay person. He minded me very much of my dear...
Joel Hopko July 25, 2020 at 9:02 am on Frye Fire: VATT Damage Assessment on June 27Fr. Paul -- I just read your account and only now realize what a close call our VATT had! I'm so relieved. I was interested to learn that you were born in Kosice. I have relatives from there and even some old letters from a Maria Yevicka to from my...
Christopher M. Graney July 20, 2020 at 6:51 am on Where to Turn? Religion, science, and the direction of MeccaThanks for the comment. "Putting one against the other" is not the idea here, or at least that does not seem the case to me.
John Lupia July 19, 2020 at 6:11 am on No safe distancing!Pareiodolia is seeing familiar images in stains like Leonardo da Vinci who wrote about his love and fascination with this as a pass time and perhaps inspire him to create his own. The late Ray Rogers, a former NASA chemist with whom I enjoyed many exchanges working on a project...
John Lupia July 18, 2020 at 7:43 am on Where to Turn? Religion, science, and the direction of MeccaBifurcation is taking thought in two directions which may or may not be associated to each other in a modal fallacy of logic. Science vs. religion is the classic foolscap award position. All truth is one. There is. No division. That was the purpose of founding the Vatican Observatory to...
Fr. James Kurzynski July 13, 2020 at 1:46 pm on Capturing the Not-So-Otherworldly Mysticism of John Muir and Pope FrancisGreat response Guy! And stay safe! Arizona is such a Covid-19 firestorm right now. I'm glad to hear you're finding ways to decompress while staying safe! Keep imaging creation with your smartphone! It's amazing what those little things can do!
Br. Guy Consolmagno July 13, 2020 at 10:29 am on Capturing the Not-So-Otherworldly Mysticism of John Muir and Pope FrancisA wonderful lesson! When the virus crisis began, my friend the historian and SF writer Ada Palmer suggested on Twitter that we start posting something nice in our timelines to remind us of the good in the world, under the hashtag #SomethingBeautiful so I started digging through my old photos…...
Dr. Brenda Frye July 12, 2020 at 10:58 am on Getting to Know a Neutron Star: How Heavy Can They Be?What a great question! I am not a quantum physicist, but will do my best to answer your question. Regarding the paper you asked about (https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.01519), their objective is to designate a new source of noise in the LIGO instrumentation. I would say, No, their result does not imply that...
Richard Saam July 9, 2020 at 8:21 am on Getting to Know a Neutron Star: How Heavy Can They Be?In the context of LIGO, there are some additional interesting reported results in terms of 40 Hz oscillations of the instrument's 40 kg mirrors due to virtual vacuum fluctuations: Quantum correlations between the light and kilogram-mass mirrors of LIGO https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.01519 Does this result imply that virtual vacuum fluctuations are not...
Fr. James Kurzynski July 2, 2020 at 5:40 am on The Not-So-Otherworldly Mysticism of John Muir and Pope FrancisLeonard my dear friend! Thank you so much for your response! It's good to hear from you. I'll check out your link. Lets reconnect. It's been far too long!
Leonard Garcia July 1, 2020 at 7:05 pm on The Not-So-Otherworldly Mysticism of John Muir and Pope FrancisDear Fr. James, Thank you for this great article. Thank you for speaking of the goodness of the created world leading us to a Catholic sacramental worldview. I especially liked your description of how in your prayerful desert experience you became more and not less aware of the natural world...
Br. Guy Consolmagno June 23, 2020 at 8:46 am on Specola Guestbook | A few reflectionsThe story begins in the late 1990s when this grad student would regularly meet up with me at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science meeting in Houston to go out to lunch. I though he was interested in my science; turns out, he was interested in my vocation. Once he...
Robert Macke June 22, 2020 at 1:47 am on Specola Guestbook | A few reflectionsThat's a bit of a long story. I may find time to tell it on the blog some day. The short version is, that summer was what got me into studying meteorites, led to my PhD work, and also started my trajectory toward being eventually assigned to the Vatican Observatory....
Robert Macke June 22, 2020 at 1:45 am on Specola Guestbook | May 23, 1914: Giovanni SilvaI hadn't thought about it in those terms, but you are right. It's quite an accomplishment.
Bob Prokop June 21, 2020 at 5:12 am on Specola Guestbook | May 23, 1914: Giovanni SilvaI'm always astonished when I read about things such as a major observatory being built in the middle of the Second World War - and in Italy, of all places!

Sacred Space Astronomy

Blog of the Vatican Observatory Foundation

Tag Archives: Sgr A*

In the Sky This Week – April 21, 2020

In the Sky This Week – August 13, 2019

Drawing the Perseids

ⓜ Science and miracles

Little Brother

In the Sky This Week – August 4, 2020

Astronomy, Contemplation of Creation, and Covid-19: Finding “Seeds Of Hope” During An International Pandemic

Specola Guestbook | June 8, 1920: Charles Cushing