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From: Lu Abel (no email)
Date: Tue Mar 14 2006 - 12:56:08 EST
In our discussion of Ptolemy and helio- vs geo-centric universes,
Galileo is often mentioned.
He is, of course, famous for being threatened with excommunication by
the Catholic church if he didn't recant his theories about the universe
being heliocentric.
Fast forward a few centuries: Don't know how many are aware of this,
but the Vatican has supported its own observatory for the last century
or so. No, not still trying to dispute Galileo (they learned their
lesson on that one), but trying to advance astronomy.
A friend of mine who is an avid amateur astronomer and an executive at
Hewlett Packard is on their Board of Directors. As a result he has
arranged a number of talks by members of the observatory as they visit
the San Francisco Bay area.
They have offices in both Italy and Arizona, with their own 1.2m
telescope observatory among the cluster of observatories atop mountains
in the Phoenix area. They do mostly planetary astronomy.
Most of their staff are men who have PhD's in astronomy and who then
decide to enter religious orders. The head of the observatory, George
Coyne, SJ (a vigorous man in his late 60s who still jogs 5 miles a day)
has "spies" who look for these sorts of folks and recruits them for the
Observatory.
The size of the group is so small (about a dozen) that getting scope
time is no problem, leading several Phoenix-area university astronomers
to quip "Unlimited scope time and all I have to do is give up sex? Where
do I sign up?" <g>
Anyway, if you're interested, see more at www.vaticanobservatory.org
Lu Abel
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