Thanks to the services offered by the Rome Observatory at their facilities at Campo Imperatore, KOCH and MAFFEO organized the re-aluminizing of the mirror of the Castel Gandolfo astrograph.

Under the guidance and monitoring of CORBALLY, CROMWELL and NELSON (Steward Observatory and VORG), with HARMER (National Optical Astronomy Observatories), manufacture of the mechanical components for the VATT's medium-resolution optical spectrograph, VattSpec, has begun. Astronomical Consultants & Equipment of Tucson has completed solid models of the various modules and the box. Fabrication will begin in 2004, to be followed by testing.

HARMER completed an optical design for a wide-field corrector to match the field of the coming 4K x 4K CCD camera for the VATT. BOYLE, CORBALLY, CROMWELL, and NELSON provided input. Modeling of the corrector’s ghost images is underway to make sure it will be an improvement over an earlier corrector.

The local area computer network (LAN) at Castel Gandolfo was upgraded by the Vatican Telephone Services according to the proposal by BOYLE and ROSSI. CAT-5 cabling and switches were installed to operate at 100 Mbps ethernet speed.

BOYLE and ROSSI installed IRAF, TABLES, STSDAS, DS9, TeX, etc. software on the new AlphaStation provided by RUFFINI (International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics [ICRA], University of Rome La Sapienza) from ICRA funds.

PELETIER (Nottingham, UK), with collaboration from CORBALLY, has given the website of the Vatican Observatory and its Foundation a new look and made it more informative. CORBALLY continues to update the website, which can now be accessed at http://www.vaticanobservatory.org.

OMIZZOLO continues the digitalization of the photographic plates in the Observatory’s archives at Castel Gandolfo using scanners both at Castel Gandolfo and at the Asiago Observatory of the University of Padua. The Observatory has acquired a scanner identical to the ones being used in the Italian national program of constructing a digital archive of data from photographic plates, thus providing homogeneity in the scanning procedures. Eight hundred archival plates taken with the Vatican Schmidt Telescope have been scanned thus far. In a collaboration with NESCI, ROSSI and DI PAOLA (University of Rome La Sapienza), OMIZZOLO is in the process of reducing data from scans made of spectra on objective prism plates taken with Schmidt telescope.

Work continues under the direction of CASANOVAS on the construction of an electronic file for the library of the Specola.