Hacker News Reader

Comment by pwil30 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Back when I was in grad school I observed at LBT (or maybe more accurately I was on a team that was observing at LBT). The Vatican's observatory down the road was affectionately referred to as the "Pope Scope."

> Mount Graham

If you want some telescope hardware pr0n, there are some cool pictures in google maps of LUCIFER...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Large+Binocular+Telescope+...

Freaking awesome...

Although I know the church has a lot of money, I can't imagine they dedicate a particularly large budget to the observatory compared to, say, a huge research university or a specialized scientific research project.

Openly musing, I'm just curious how they decide which projects to pursue, and how they contribute to the community? I know nothing about astronomy, but I imagine like many areas of research, they have conferences on various topics, so perhaps the VO scientists participate in conferences relevant to their research. Which again, of course, brings up the question "how do they decide what to research"?

> Although I know the church has a lot of money, I can't imagine they dedicate a particularly large budget to the observatory compared to, say, a huge research university or a specialized scientific research project.

The VO has about the same share of the State of Vatican City's budget as NASA does of the US budget (but the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope has a separate foundation, largely funded by private donations, that funded its construction and funds its ongoing maintenance, without going through the general Vatican City budget.)

It's all about Easter.

The church chose a mildly ridiculous, astronomically difficult and contentious definition of Easter: the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox.

So it combines 3 complex systems: sun, moon and calendar.

Religious extremism and pedantry increased the priority of accuracy and agreement. For some reason, Christians argued (fought wars) over the definition of Easter, and then regarded anyone picking the wrong day as a malevolent heretic.

I imagine Easter could be one of the issues that led Swift to write the Lilliputian egg dispute in Gulliver's Travels.

This is a very random question, but do you know why it isn't on the va TLD?

I think vaticanobservatory.org is run by the Vatican Observatory Foundation (a private foundation supporting some aspects of the VO's work) whereas vaticanobservatory.va is run by the Vatican Observatory in the strict sense (the government department of the State of Vatican City.)

> I think vaticanobservatory.org is run by the Vatican Observatory Foundation (a private foundation supporting some aspects of the VO's work) whereas vaticanobservatory.va is run by the Vatican Observatory in the strict sense (the government department of the State of Vatican City.)

This exactly. When our agency was working with them, there was some initial hope that we could consolidate the websites on the .va property, but we quickly realized that was not going to happen, primarily due to the separation required with the foundation wing.

Also, it is in general very difficult for an outside vendor to get clearance to build on a .va domain, and you need someone internally to apply a lot of leverage to get the wheels spinning with Vatican IT. Our agency was able to do this with building out the migrants-refugees.va website, thanks to the help of (now Cardinal) Michael Czerny who ran the M&R Section at the time and was given a lot of direct executive power from Pope Francis, but boy, that was still not easy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com