Tag Archives: Vatican Observatory summer school

What happens at a Vatican Observatory Summer School?

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It’s back to school time in the northern hemisphere, and at the Vatican Observatory we’re both celebrating our summer schools past and letting the world know about our Summer School, Future! First, some information about the upcoming summer school. It’s called the VOSS (for Vatican Observatory Summer School.) It runs for four weeks. It is open to students from around the world who are in the last years of their undergraduate or opening years of graduate studies in astronomy or astrophysics; it is held at our headquarters in Castel Gandolfo; it features a world class teaching staff (more about them, below); and it’s free. (If you can afford it, we ask you to pay some part of the cost of travel and housing; if you can’t, we cover it.) There are two restrictions on who gets to attend. First, we only want students who intend to continue in a career in astronomy. This is not for anyone who already has … Continue reading →

Turned toward the vastness

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[A version of this appeared at CatholicPhilly.com in July 2010.] On Friday, I walked onto the driveway to call the cat in for the night, peering under her favorite bushes, warmed by the brick wall of the house. I happened to look up. There, on a velvety deep cobalt sky, perfectly framed between two towering trees across the street, was a brilliant Venus and a slim crescent of the moon. The sight took my breath away, so much so that after a moment, I went back inside and pulled my husband out of bed to come see. As I sat on the driveway, watching the moon inexorably slip away, I remembered an evening sitting on a bench outside the Jesuit retreat house on Eastern Point in Massachusetts. The bench faced east, not west, so instead of watching the fiery exuberant swirls of red and gold over Gloucester bay, my view was one of an impending darkness extending further than I … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Ephemeral science

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This entry is part 129 of 190 in the series Across the Universe

  This column first ran in The Tablet in June 2016 Over the past thirty years the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo has been hosting a biennial summer school, where we invite young scholars from around the world to spend four weeks with us, exploring in depth some topic in astrophysics. [The 2016] school was centered on water in the solar system and beyond. It’s an area that I’ve worked in since I was a young scholar myself; my master’s thesis, now more than 40 years old, was all about Jupiter and Saturn’s icy moons. All of my work on the topic, of course, is long obsolete. Just four years after I had made my computer models to predict what we’d see at those moons, the Voyager spacecraft actually visited Jupiter and revealed its moons to be worlds far more elaborate than anything I could have proposed. Still, the basic science hasn’t changed; at our school we taught how to use properties like … Continue reading →