Orlando Florida Graduate Is Working With Jesuit's At Castle Gandolfo Observatory

UCF star graduate to lend a hand to the Vatican's labs
A UCF astronomy graduate will help update the observatory's telescopes.
Tanya Caldwell
Sentinel Staff Writer
December 21, 2007

Nate Lust is going to Rome to do what the Romans couldn't do. The recent University of Central Florida astronomy graduate has been hired to modernize old telescopes for the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo, the pope's summer palace. Astronomers have been trying to do that for years without much success. Even though the observatory is outside of Rome, the Eternal City's bright lights make it hard for the Vatican's telescopes to see the stars, and that's hard on astronomers doing research, said Guy Consolmagno, the observatory's director. But Lust has found a way for UCF's telescope to electronically filter out Orlando's light pollution. His efforts are part of the reason the new 20-inch telescope at UCF's Robinson Observatory is one of the best in the state, scientists say. The Vatican hopes Lust can do the same for its optics. "They want to be able to have a Jesuit priest who doesn't know a lot about the technical side . . . to be able to sit down at a computer and say: 'OK. Let's look at this. Click. Go,' " Lust said. "I have no idea how much work it's going to take me to get to that point." The Vatican has several telescopes that could use Lust's touch, astronomers said. He'll primarily be working on a Zeiss refractor telescope built in 1935, but there may be others for Lust to upgrade before he leaves in late February, Consolmagno said."For us, the great advantage is having someone here with equipment that has already succeeded in this kind of program elsewhere," Consolmagno, who is in Rome, wrote in an e-mail. "We have every reason to hope that he will be able to help us set up a similar style of observatory here, rescuing some beautiful old telescopes with some cutting-edge technology to bring a program of regular observational astronomy back to Castel Gandolfo."

The Vatican Observatory, run by Jesuits, is one of the oldest in the world, scientists say. "We are the only scientific institution funded directly by the Vatican, but of course cutting-edge scientific research goes on at every Catholic university in the world; there's nothing new about that," Consolmagno wrote. "After all, it was in the Church-sponsored universities in the middle ages where astronomy was first studied as an academic subject."

One reason the Vatican specifically supports an astronomical observatory is to show the world that it is not opposed to science, but rather embraces and supports it."The church hasn't always supported astronomical innovation. In the 17th century, the Roman Catholic Church denounced Galileo for his beliefs that the Earth orbited the sun and placed him under house arrest. In 1992, Pope John Paul II acknowledged that the church had erred in condemning Galileo.Lust will be the first student the astronomers have called on to computerize its telescopes, officials said. He leaves Jan. 2 and will spend the next two months working at the observatory.There's no telling whether Lust will meet Pope Benedict XVI during this trip. But if he's invited back during the summer, he might."I think it's going to be very interesting," Lust said Thursday from inside UCF'S Robinson Observatory. "It's basically once in a lifetime, but not even. It's more rare than that. It's not once in everybody's lifetime."It's kind of this weird, odd, unique thing," Lust said. "I mean, it's the Vatican. In a thousand years, that telescope's still going to be there. And it's still going to have been me who did the work on it. I think that's very exciting."

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Link to the Orlando Sentinal article (here)