 |
|
(Father Angelo Secchi in the foreground is surrounded
by (from leftbackground to right foreground) Pope Gregory XIII,
Pope Leo XIII, and Pope Pius XI. Painting by Fantini.) |
|
For a little more than four decades astronomical research, which
included a prominent international program to map the whole sky, was
carried out in the shadow of St. Peter's, but it eventually became
obvious that the urban growth of the Eternal City was brightening the sky to such
an extent that the fainter stars could no longer be studied.
Thus it was that
Pope Pius XI provided a new location for the Observatory at the Papal
Summer Residence at Castel Gandolfo [ illustrated ] in the Alban Hills some 25
kilometers southeast of Rome.
|
It is here that the modern observatory,
entrusted to the Jesuits, was refounded in the 1930s with the construction
of two new telescopes, the installation of an astrophysical laboratory for
spectrochemical analysis, and the expansion of several important research
programs on variable stars. With the installation of a Schmidt wide-angle
telescope in 1957 research was extended to other topics such as new
techniques for the classification of stars according to their spectra.
This is still an active program at the observatory and recalls the
pioneering work of Angelo Secchi. |
Details of these historical telescopes can be found on the
Instrumentation page of this web site.
|
|
