Fr. Giuseppe Lais, Astronomer

  • Article
  • 800 words
  • Level: all audiences (Italian)

Fr. Sabino Maffeo, a physicist with the Vatican Observatory since 1985, writes about Fr. Giuseppe Lais, who worked with Angelo Secchi and the early Vatican Observatory.

Click here for the full text of this article, which was published in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Vol. 63 (2004), p. 93-94.

Oratorian Father Giuseppe Lais (1845-1921), was the astronomer who did most of the photography for a collaborative project the Vatican participated in from 1894 into the 1950s to create a photographic map of the heavens and to catalog the stars. Father Lais is pictured in this undated photo using the Carte du Ciel (Celestial Map) telescope in the Leonine Tower at the Vatican. (CNS photo/courtesy Vatican Observatory).  See CNS: “Mapping with the stars“, 4/28/2016.