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From the Director A Year to Remember Many events occurred over the past year at the Vatican Observatory that we can accept with joy and quiet gratitude. But it would, indeed, be very shortsighted of us if we did not realize that, since the tragic events of 11 September, we all live in a changed world. Our passion to understand the universe as astronomers and friends of astronomers cannot become for us a refuge from the need to confront the problems that face all of us as citizens of the Earth. And so I ask you: Can our scientific research and all of the associated activities that we describe in these Annual Reports make any contribution to nourishing peace and harmony on this insignificantly small piece of the universe on which we live? The photograph on the cover of this year's Annual Report was selected for the unique moment in the history of the United States, and the world, that it preserves. The photograph was taken the evening of 10 September at the University of Arizona's Bok Telescope on Kitt Peak outside of Tucson. Vatican Observatory astronomer Chris Corbally and visiting scholar Aileen O'Donoghue were preparing to begin a full night of astronomical observations. David Harvey, of the Computer Support Group at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, photographed the astronomers as they stood on the telescope's catwalk to watch a magnificent Arizona sunsetthe last, as it turned out, that they would see before the dawn of a new age for the world. The clouds in the evening sky, having displayed their beauty in the setting sun, fortunately disappeared soon afterwards, and our astronomers went inside to work at the telescope to try to understand nature's beauty in the cosmos. When their nighttime labors were over, they slept late into the next morning, unaware of the tragic events unfolding on the other side of the continent. We record that historic sunset on our cover in remembrance of all of the victims of 11 September and with a prayer and a dream that beauty will win out over hatred and that our pursuit of knowledge will contribute to the realization of that dream. If ignorance nourishes hatred, then knowledge, especially that gained in collaboration with others of
different ethnic and religious backgrounds, must surely be a path to peace and harmony. It is our fond hope
that the Vatican Observatory's Summer Schools in Observational Astronomy and Astrophysics are serving
that purpose, and the memories we have of our schools indicate that our hope is well founded. The eighth
Summer School took place this year and is described later in this section. The schools, which began in
1986, have brought together nearly 200 young scholars from 50 different nations around the world. The
map shows how far and wide the Summer Schools have reached.
As the tragic events unfolded in the northeastern United States on the morning of 11 September, it was mid-afternoon in Rome, where Vatican Observatory astronomer Guy Consolmagno and his colleagues were busily into the second half of the second day of the 64th annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society, for which the Vatican Observatory was a major sponsor and Consolmagno served as chair of the local organizing committee. The meeting was the largest in the history of the Meteoritical Society. Some 600 participants came from more than 20 nations to attend the conference held at the Pontifical Gregorian University. Here, in the historical center of Rome, was a microcosm of a world that had been struck by evil. The morning after 11 September many participants attended the Papal Audience in St. Peter's Square where they were able to share their dismay with John Paul II, who was clearly shaken and who requested personally that there be none of the song, laughter, and applause that usually exhilarate the audiences. He asked instead for a spirit of recollection and prayer for the victims of the attack and their families, for the many suffering nations, and for a world in which hatred would, in the end, be defeated. During the following days, the international scientific cohort went about their work at the conference, talking about the latest discoveries about meteorites, comets, and asteroids. They did so with heavy hearts but with a sense that their solidarity in research could contribute to bringing about the very thing for which the Pope had prayedthe defeat of hatred in whatever form and wherever it exists. Research Highlights Chronicling the history of science is an integral part of the research mission of the Vatican Observatory. In that light, we are happy to report the publication this year of Sabino Maffeo's The Vatican Observatory: In the Service of Nine Popes, in both Italian and English. This book is a revised and enlarged edition of In the Service of Nine Popes: 100 Years of the Vatican Observatory, which was published a decade earlier. Maffeo's meticulous recording of more than 110 years of Observatory history reassures us of the contribution we can make toward a better tomorrow by our scientific research. In that spirit, I wrote the following in the book's Presentation: As the fruit of the author's labors we have in this book the most complete history of the Vatican Observatory ever written. However, to the attentive reader it will become obvious that we have here not only a faithful presentation of historical facts and figures, but also a fulfillment in our times of the original intentions of Pope Leo XIII in founding the Observatory, namely, " ... that everyone might see clearly that the Church and her Pastors are not opposed to true and solid science, whether human or divine, but that they embrace it, encourage it, and promote it with the fullest possible dedication." This book intends to explain to the general public more than to experts what the Pope's astronomers do and why they do it. Thus it responds in an exemplary way to those original intentions of the Pope. What gives particular value to this publication is Maffeo's new research on the directorship of Father Angelo Rodríguez, who took over the Specola's administration in 1898. Rodríguez, a meteorologist, had little interest in the observatory's primary astronomical work at the time, which was joining other astronomers around the world in measuring the magnitude and position of stars on hundreds of photographic plates for a project known as the International Sky Map. According to Maffeo, "This enterprise represented the first great example of international collaboration in an astronomical program." Unfortunately, because of the director's lack of interest, work on the star catalog was temporarily suspended. Rodríguez's directorship was an especially difficult period for the Specola as it moved from an institute struggling to establish research programs to a true astronomical observatory. I think that Maffeo's efforts are particularly helpful in that properly recording this part of the Observatory's past reminds us of how human and so how fallible we, and all that we do, are. The Vatican Observatory's 140-Year-Old Program in Stellar Spectroscopy Sabino Maffeo's history of the Vatican Observatory describes the accomplishments of Angelo Secchi, S.J., who in 1850 became director of the Observatory of the Roman College, the forerunner of today's Specola Vaticana (Vatican Observatory in Italian). In the 1860s, Secchi experimented with a new technique, called spectroscopy, which uses a prism to split light into its component colors. Secchi attached a prism to the front of a telescope and found that this technique could be used to break a star's light into its corresponding spectrum of colors containing features specific to each star. In doing so, he discovered that stars could be classified according to their spectral differences. Secchi, who is considered the father of the spectral classification of stars, used spectroscopy to observe more than 4,000 stars, launching a scientific endeavor that continues today at the Vatican Observatory. Continuing this research for the Specola are Richard Boyle and Christopher Corbally, who have been working for many years along with astronomers from Canada, Lithuania, Poland, Wales, Italy, and the United States, a truly international collaboration. Each year as we report on the staff's research activities, we are also building up a history of certain continuing areas of the Observatory's interests, such as the spectral classification of stars begun by Secchi. But it is not often that we take the time to purposefully look at that history. Boyle kindly provided us with the historical account presented here of the work that led up to the Vatican Observatory's current research in this area. In the early 1900s, the pioneering astronomers Hertzsprung, a Dane, and Russell, an American, made a major advancement to Secchi's initial discovery. They observed that the relative brightness of different colors in a star's spectrum can provide information about the star's intrinsic size and brightness, and ultimately about its age and the history of the region of the galaxy where it formed. By the way, both Hertzsprung and Russel visited the Specola. Throughout most of the twentieth century, a long-term project of astronomers worldwide was to measure spectra of as many stars in as many regions as possible. Telescopes like the Vatican Observatory's Double Astrograph, and later the Schmidt, at Castel Gandolfo were pressed into service. These instruments were designed to capture light from a wide swath of the sky, guide it through a giant prism, and capture the resulting "rainbows" of starlight on a photographic plate. Astronomers then had to identify and classify each spectrum on the photograph by eye. Thousands of stars were classified this way. But the relatively low sensitivity of photographic plates and the labor-intensive nature of working with them ultimately limited the science that could be done in this fashion. In the 1960s, the photographic plate began to be replaced by more-sensitive electronic detectors. These photoelectric tubes, however, could only measure one star at a time, but with a precision far greater than the crude spectra on the photographic plates. A further refinement was made by passing the starlight through filters. This allowed astronomers to estimate the star's color rather than look at its entire spectrum. One popular set of filters used at that time was developed by the Danish astronomer Strömgren. Each filter in his set took in a wide range of color. By comparing the brightness of the star from one filter to the next, a stellar classification could be determined for most ordinary stars. In the 1980s, the light detectors in telescopes were almost completely replaced by electronic CCD chips. These both exceeded the sensitivity of the photoelectric tube and captured at once a whole collection of stars in a given region of the sky. Indeed, the sensitivity of the CCD chips gave rise to a new practical problem: instead of a few bright stars in a given small field of view, astronomers now had to analyze dozens to hundreds of stars in each tiny region of the sky. Around this time, astronomers recognized an inherent weakness in the Strömgren filters for classifying certain stars whose colors had been altered when their light passed through clouds of interstellar dust. For those stars, data taken with the Strömgren filters gave rise to an ambiguity: Was a given star "red" because of its intrinsic color, or because the dust had scattered away the blue light? A new set of filters, known as the Vilnius filters (named for the Observatory of Vilnius, Lithuania, where this system was developed) was devised that did away with this ambiguity. But an enormous amount of work had already been done using the Strömgren filters, and it seemed a waste to discard that work. Thus in the 1990s, astronomers agreed on a compromise set of filters combining the best of both sets and known today as the Stromvil Photometric System. Boyle and his collaborators are now making many photoelectric and CCD observations of galactic and globular star clusters using this new Stromvil system with the Vatican Observatory's VATT as well as with other telescopes. Because of its efficiency, the Stromvil filter system has also been proposed for use on the European Space Agency's GAIA mission, scheduled for launch in 2010 to map the billion brightest objects in the sky. Vatican Observatory Summer School The Eighth Vatican Observatory Summer School in Observational Astronomy and Astrophysics was held at the Observatory's headquarters in Castel Gandolfo from 16 June to 13 July. The topic of this year's School, "Observations and Theoretical Understanding of Stellar Remnants," attracted 26 students from 19 countries. 
VOSS 2001 student Katherine Vieira of Venezuela observes the sun during a class exercise directed by Emmanuel Carreira, S.J. (left). (Photo by VOSS 2001 student Alan Yost, S.J.)
The faculty included Gary Schmidt, University of Arizona; Ramesh Narayan, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Francesca D'Antona, Rome Observatory at Monte Porzio; and the Vatican Observatory's William Stoeger. On 4 July His Holiness John Paul II received the group in St. Peter's Square at the termination of the General Audience. The Pope gave the students a special written message in which, among other statements, he remarked: "Your personal and professional friendships, which embrace a variety of political, cultural, and religious differences, are one of the most precious fruits of the School, and I pray that these bonds will endure through the years." The young scholars were joined at the audience by the guests of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. Personnel News As of 1 September, Giuseppe Koch, S.J., joins the staff of the Observatory as Assistant to the Director. Father Koch entered the Society of Jesus in 1958 and obtained his degree in Mathematics and Physics in 1966 at the University of Rome. Since 1970 he has been doing pastoral work and teaching physics in the Jesuit Secondary Schools of Rome and of Palermo, Sicily. As of 1 September, Javier Igea Lopez-Fando, priest of the Diocese of Toledo, Spain, joins the staff of the Observatory on a half-time basis. Igea obtained his doctorate in 1998 at New York University with a thesis on proto-planetary disks. He will continue half-time as Professor of Philosophical Cosmology in the seminary of Toledo. Marcelo B. Ribiero arrived September 4 to begin a year of collaborative research in cosmology with Stoeger at VORG. He is an Associate Professor in the Physics Institute, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and his research is being funded by Brazil's Ministry of Education, CAPES. Aileen O'Donoghue, physics and astronomy professor to undergraduates at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, since 1988, is spending her sabbatical leave for the 2001-2002 academic year as a visiting scholar with the VORG. Her astronomical research has been almost entirely in the radio band, and she has used the Very Large Array Radio Telescope in Socorro, New Mexico, to image extended radio galaxies and analyze the flow dynamics of the extended structure. Realizing that optical astronomy is more amenable to the involvement of undergraduates in research, she has come to the Vatican Observatory to gain expertise in optical observations and analysis. O'Donoghue is also interested in the science-religion interface and has been involved in the Science and the Spiritual Quest II program of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, California. Richard J. Murphy, S.J., has been appointed Superior of the Jesuit Community of the Vatican Observatory in Tucson. Sabino Maffeo, S.J., remains as Superior of the Community at Castel Gandolfo. Carolina Fornino in Longobardi, who resides in Grottaferrata, a neighboring town to Castel Gandolfo, is working as a volunteer in the Vatican Observatory's library. Vatican Observatory Foundation Annual Meeting The annual meeting of the members and directors of the Vatican Observatory Foundation was held on 23 February 2001 in Tucson, Arizona. The following were elected to serve as members and directors for a three-year period: CHRISTOPHER J. CORBALLY, S.J., BEN DALBY, PAULA D'ANGELO, PAUL M. HENKELS, CHRISTOPHER P. HITCHCOCK, CHARLES W. POLZER, S.J., and WILLIAM R. STOEGER, S.J. On the day preceding the annual meeting, a seminar was conducted by members of the Observatory staff to present their research in a popular forum to friends of the Observatory and to members of the Board. On the day after the meeting the same group was accompanied on an excursion to the observatories on Mt. Hopkins. Through the efforts of NANCY KNOCHE, Development Director, and JAMES McGEE, Chair of the Development Committee, the Foundation continues the two Vatican Observatory Guild giving plans announced in the 2000 Annual Report: the Circles of Giving and the Reaching for the Heavens Guild membership. At each Board meeting a festive dinner is held to welcome major donors into the various Circles of Giving, which have been named in honor of the following eminent persons in the history of the Church and science: John Paul II, Leo XIII, Gregory XIII, Pius XI, Angelo Secchi, S.J., Eusebio Kino, S.J., Christoph Clavius, S.J., and Georges Lemaître. During the past year, the Development Committee organized a number of events for Observatory supporters, in particular: a luncheon in New York on 4 June hosted by Peter Mullen, with Cardinal Avery Dulles as honorary guest, and a visit to Rome, the Vatican, and the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo in July organized by Paula D'Angelo, a member of the Foundation Board. Once again through the efforts of BRENDAN D. THOMSON, an official Vatican Observatory calendar for the year 2001 has been produced with the theme, "Young Astronomers Lead Us to a Better Tomorrow." Among the images featured in the calendar are pictures of Earth and the cosmos taken by alumni of the Vatican Observatory Summer Schools. George V. Coyne, S.J., Director |
We are especially proud that 58 percent
of the participants came from developing countries, and that 42 percent were women. Their Summer
School experience along with the recommendations provided by the School's faculty have enabled many of
the students to go on to study and pursue careers in some of the most prestigious centers in the world for
astrophysical research. In particular, six studentsfrom Argentina, Bulgaria, Peru, Russia, South Africa,
and the Ukrainehave been awarded graduate scholarships from the Jesuit Community of the Vatican
Observatory. We are proud of all of the 200 alumni of the Summer Schools. Each in their own quiet way is
a sign to their neighbors that peace is indeed a gift, but one that must be earned by the common pursuit of
all those activities that unite us as human beings. The Vatican Observatory Summer Schools bear witness
to the fact that a passion to understand the universe through research does just that unites us all.
