The life of a Vatican astronomer

The Walrus : Installed on the second floor of a small building on the summit of Arizona’s Mount Graham , Guy Consolmagno is multitasking. He’s checking e-mail on his laptop and listening to the Penguin Cafe Orchestra on his iPod, all the while keeping an eye on a bank of computer monitors. One floor up, nestled in a silvery-white dome, a telescope is trained on a potato-shaped chunk of rock and ice known as Haumea , which orbits the Sun some six billion kilometers from Earth. Thin clouds have been drifting overhead since sundown, but if they dissipate, the telescope’s digital camera will record changes in Haumea’s brightness as it tumbles through the outer reaches of the solar system, offering Consolmagno and fellow astronomers hints about the structure and evolution of our planetary family.All this is typical fare for a scientist. What is perhaps surprising is that Consolmagno is also a Jesuit brother, that many of his colleagues are ordained priests, and that they’re scanning the heavens with the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope or, more affectionately, the “Pope scope.” The state-of-the-art facility is part of the Vatican Observatory , established behind St. Peter’s Basilica in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII at least partly to show that the Roman Catholic Church was not anti-science—an allegation that has persisted since Galileo was dragged before the Inquisition for claiming that the Earth moves.