from Hacker News

Vatican Observatory

by alexmolas on 5/2/25, 8:26 AM with 53 comments

• by pwil30 on 5/2/25, 3:36 PM

  Pleasantly surprised to see this on the HN homepage! Our agency (Longbeard) rebuilt this website a few years ago. It was fun working with the great people there, including Br. Guy who is a fantastic ambassador for the VO.

  As you can imagine the Castel Gandolfo telescopes are mainly historical at this point due to light pollution, so their VATT facility in Arizona (Mount Graham) is now where most of their actual astonomical work is conducted.

  Interestingly, the VATT in AZ is directly adjacent to the LBT facility on Mount Graham, which has a near-infrared instrument formerly named - believe it or not - LUCIFER (Large Binocular Telescope Near-infrared Spectroscopic Utility with Camera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research).

  This was changed to LUCI in 2012 as the name predictably caused some problems and confusion.

• by rdtsc on 5/2/25, 1:26 PM

  It’s also interesting that the idea of a Big Bang originated with Georges Lemaître — a Catholic priest and theoretical physicist. He called it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom” initially.

  The term itself was invented by his opponents who sort of ridiculed Georges initially.

• by erk__ on 5/2/25, 1:07 PM

  Brady Haran of Numberphile and a whole bunch of other channels visited the observatory some years back and made some videos and interviews.

  The Pope's Astronomer - Interview with Brother Guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0DAKaR16cY

  The Pope's Telescopes - A tour of the observatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccoGKAL6Qas

  The Pope's Space Rocks - A look at their collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OI4wb2XIZc

• by sega_sai on 5/2/25, 2:41 PM

  They also do month-long astrophysics summer schools for students every two years or so. I was lucky to be part of the school ~20 years ago. We had classes in the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo and audience with John Paul II. It was a great opportunity.

• by pfdietz on 5/2/25, 12:29 PM

  Brother Guy often showed (shows?) up at science fiction conventions in the Chicago area. Great fellow.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno

• by impish9208 on 5/2/25, 6:33 PM

  I suspect a lot of non-Catholics would be surprised by the Vatican’s position on creation, cosmology, evolution, the literalness (or lack thereof) of Genesis etc. A Jesuit priest would probably be considered a heretic by the average American Evangelical.

• by qoez on 5/2/25, 1:12 PM

  This was featured in Werner Herzogs movie "Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds"

• by Animats on 5/2/25, 6:40 PM

  Oh, an astronomical observatory, not the newspaper. The Vatican''s in-house newspaper is L'Osservatore Romano.[1]

  [1] https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en.html

• by NoSalt on 5/2/25, 4:28 PM

  They have come a long way since convicting Galileo of "a strong suspicion of heresy".

• by theodorethomas on 5/2/25, 2:38 PM

  Before smartphones we had https://www.cambridge.org/turnleft

• by fennecbutt on 5/3/25, 12:09 AM

  Galileo is rolling in his grave.

• by BobbyTables2 on 5/3/25, 1:08 AM

  I hope they look inward too…