This year marks a special anniversary for three of the Jesuits at the Vatican Observatory: Fathers Richard Boyle and William Stoeger each celebrate 50 years as Jesuits in 2011, and Father George Coyne celebrates his 60th!

On June 15th, Fr. George Coyne appeared on Tucson's local radio station KJLL.

Since the very first design phases, remote observing has been one of our goals for VATT. This would allow the telescope to be operated by an off-site user, for example, someone in our offices in Castel Gandolfo, Italy.

High above the Southern Arizona desert two white domes peek out of Pinaleno Mountains near Safford. The two domes are observatories, one is run by the Vatican, and the University of Arizona operates the larger telescope.

Catholic News Service published an article on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first telescope observations. Much of the article comes from an interview with Br. Guy Consolmagno.

We are pleased to announce that VATTSpec had its "first light" tonight! While more work remains to be done fine-tuning the alignment and calibrating the instrument, this represents a major milestone in bringing VATTSpec on-line for scientific operation.

Our "cosmology" is the sum of our assumptions and deductions of how the universe behaves. With the advent of modern physics, the term has been appropriated by physicists and astronomers to represent a scientific description of the origin and nature of the physical universe.

I am going to try to present in broad strokes what I think is some of the best our modern scientific understanding of the universe, and then ask the question at the end: Did God do it?

The Colbert Report: Gold, Frankincense and Mars - Guy Consolmagno

Uploaded by vatican on Sep 17, 2009

On Wednesday afternoon, September 16th, Benedict XVI inaugurated the new premises of the Specola Vaticana, the Vatican Observatory.