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Ustwo · 02-09-2008, 09:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Augi

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@Ustwo:

I don't know the priest you are thinking of... but there was Giordano Bruno, the 17th-century monk burned at the stake for his opinion that every star in the night sky was a sun, very much like our own, with planets that have life created by God.

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I looked it up, the guy I was thinking of was....

Angelo Secchi, S.J. was born in Reggio, Italy and died in Rome. He was a physicist and mathematician with remarkable ability and passion for astronomy. Angelo worked in stellar spectroscopy, made the first systematic spectroscopic survey of the heavens, pioneered in classifying stars by their four spectral types, studied sunspots, solar prominences, photographed solar corona during the eclipse in 1860, invented the heliospectroscope, star spectroscope, telespectroscope and meteorograph. He also studied double stars, weather forecasting and terrestrial magnetism. He became director of the Vatican Observatory at the age of 32 and dedicated himself energetically to the task. Sabino Maffeo S.J. tells the story of his tenure at the Vatican Observatory. (See Maffeo S.J. Sabino, In the Service of the Popes Translation by George V. Coyne, S.J. Pg. 13-15).

He acquired an equatorial telescope of Merz with an aperture of 24 cm and a focal length of 435 cm, an excellent instrument for those times. Angelo decided to transfer the observatory to the top of the Church of St. Ignatius, a perfect foundation for an observatory, because the Church had been originally designed to support a dome 80 meters high and 17 meters wide. This Pontifical Observatory, famous for the discoveries of Father Secchi, was certainly more known to many generations of Romans for the simple, practical, daily service it offered them. It gave them the exact time of day.