Searching for the (Star) Light at the Vatican Observatory
When he completed his Ph.D. studies in planetary sciences at the University of Arizona he said he had a "crisis of faith, not in my religion but in my science," he said, adding: "I thought, Why am I doing science, writing papers
that five people will read, when there are people starving around the world?’" He quit academia and joined the Peace Corps, moving to Kenya in 1983 to teach first high school in rural areas and then university.
What that star might have been — a comet, supernova, or the conjunction of planets, let alone whether it ever existed — is one of the recurring questions
that Brother Guy Consolmagno is called on to answer even though, he noted dryly, "it has nothing to do with our work as scientists at the Vatican Observatory." "Too often people get distracted by the Star and forget to look at the Child!
And yet I also have to admit I feel a certain joy in the story, and a joy
that this story has been so popular for so many people over the centuries," said Brother Consolmagno, since 2015, the director of La Specola Vaticana (which translates as Vatican Observatory).
Brother Consolmagno said that The work we do here can take 10 or even 20 years before it bears fruit and the Vatican is happy to bear it,
There are four telescopes under domes at Castel Gandolfo,
and on a chilly morning Brother Consolmagno draped rather awkwardly on a reclinable chair, peered gingerly into the viewfinder of one: a 19th century model used when the Vatican was one of 20 observatories to participate in the Carte du Ciel astronomical project to map millions of stars on photographic plates.
