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16/05/01/178244 story

Mapping With the Stars: Nuns Instrumental in Vatican Celestial Survey

posted by cmn32480 on Monday May 02 2016, @01:31AM   
from the science-at-night dept.

"exec" writes:

Mapping with the stars: Nuns instrumental in Vatican celestial survey

Sisters Emilia Ponzoni, Regina Colombo, Concetta Finardi and Luigia Panceri, all born in the late 1800s and from the northern Lombardy region near Milan, helped map and catalog nearly half a million stars for the Vatican's part in an international survey of the night sky.

Top astronomers from around the world met in Paris in 1887 and again in 1889 to coordinate the creation of a photographic "Celestial Map" ("Carte du Ciel") and an "astrographic" catalog pinpointing the stars' positions.

Italian astronomer and meteorologist, Barnabite Father Francesco Denza, easily convinced Pope Leo XIII to let the Holy See take part in the initiative, which assigned participating observatories a specific slice of the sky to photograph, map and catalog.

Father Maffeo, an expert in the observatory's history and its archivist, said Pope Leo saw the Vatican's participation as a way to show the world that "the church supported science" and "was not just concerned with theology and religion."

The Vatican was one of about 18 observatories that spent the next several decades taking thousands of glass-plate photographs with their telescopes and cataloging data for the massive project.

-- submitted from IRC

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Original Submission

• Reminds me of Tycho Brahe Reminds me of Tycho Brahe (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2016, @01:40AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2016, @01:40AM (#340033)

  Unwittingly setting the table for his assistant Kepler, who made his great discoveries after Brahe's death.

  Is there a prestigious award for experimental science, w/o regards to coming up with new theories? There should be.

  • Re:Reminds me of Tycho Brahe (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Monday May 02 2016, @02:09AM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Monday May 02 2016, @02:09AM (#340045) Journal

    The Nobel Prizes seem to be awarded for experimental science just as much as theoretical, maybe even more. It seems that, at least in recent days, more Nobels in Physics were awarded for doing experiments that verify existing theories, like the 1993 one was getting indirect evidence of gravitational radiation. 1995's prize was half for doing experiments that proved the existence of the neutrino (this was long overdue: Frederick Reines had to wait forty years to be recognised for his work!). 1996's prize was given for experiments illustrating superfluidity in Helium-3. 1997 was for experiments using laser ion traps. 2001 was for producing Bose-Einstein condensates. Theoretical contributions these days tend to be awarded along with the experimentalists that verify them, e.g. 2013's was shared by Peter Higgs for his theoretical formulation of the Higgs Boson and François Englert for his experiments at the LHC that proved Higgs's theory right.

    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.

    Parent

• no such Space Pope no such Space Pope (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2016, @03:14AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2016, @03:14AM (#340059)

  How many Popes have been to Space? That's right, none. Zero popes have received the blessing of the God Nebula.

  • Re:no such Space Pope Re:no such Space Pope (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2016, @04:55AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2016, @04:55AM (#340089)

    Whoa there, big fella! No one makes a space helmet big enough for that hat!

    Parent

    • Re:no such Space Pope (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2016, @05:52AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2016, @05:52AM (#340106)

      If you are a devout Catholic, do not click this link. [ytimg.com]
       

      Parent

• Vatican Observatory: (Score: 4, Informative) by Hartree on Monday May 02 2016, @05:32AM

  by Hartree (195) on Monday May 02 2016, @05:32AM (#340101)

  You can take a look at its web page at: http://www.vaticanobservatory.va/content/specolavaticana/en.html [vaticanobservatory.va]

  The current director, Br. Guy Consolmagno is a scifi fan and a regular speaker at various scifi conventions as well as being a scientist who's done a lot of work on the composition of meteorites.

  He's written a number of popular books on astronomy. Probably his best known is Turn Left at Orion.

  Since they don't have to go through the grant process, they tend to do quite useful long term work, like cataloguing physical properties of meteorites and long term photometry of stars. Like the laborious sky surveys mentioned above, it's bread and butter work that others then use the data from.

  He's a great guy, kind of a geek and a fascinating speaker. Most people here would find him Good People(tm)

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