Director, Vatican Observatory Br. Guy Consolmagno – TMO Background Mode Interview
Br. Guy Consolmagno earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Planetary Science from MIT and his Ph.D. in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona. He’s been at the Vatican Observatory since 1993 and is currently the director there where his research explores connections between meteorites, asteroids, and the evolution of small solar system bodies. Br. Guy has co-authored two astronomy books as well as popular books such as Would you Baptize and Extraterrestrial?” He is a Jesuit Brother.
We chatted about Br. Guy’s post-graduate work, how he came to be at the Vatican Observatory—and then become the director. He explained why the Vatican has an observatory and how the Catholic Church is not anti-science. Actually he is just part of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that advises the Pope. And there was much, much more.
Sponsors
Today our sponsor is Linode.
Linode helps you design, develop and deploy in the cloud.
You can build dedicated CPU, distributed applications, hosted services, websites, and CI/CD environments. If it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode.
Linde is focused on simplicity, service, and value.
The goal is to maximize the benefit you receive from your cloud by making it cost-effective to deploy robust compute, storage, and networking services that meet your ever-changing performance needs.
Featured are native SSD storage, a 40 Gbit network, and industry leading processors
Pick from any of 10 worldwide data centers including the newest in Toronto.
Pay only for what you use with hourly billing across all plans and add-on services. Plus, 24 x 7 live customer support is always just a phone call away.
You’ll be able to deploy and maintain your infrastructure simply and cost effectively.
Plus, Linode’s tools make it easy to provision, secure, monitor, and back up your cloud.
To learn more, visit linode.com/bgm and receive a $20 credit when you use promocode: bgm2019 .
Show Notes
My Background Mode interview with Br. Guy Consolmagno
- Br. Guy on Twitter.
- Discussed: Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?
- Br. Guy's Bio.
- Sacred Space Astronomy.
- Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
- Support TMO when you buy your Apple gear from Apple.
- The story of my Background Mode podcast.
- TMO Background Mode Twitter feed.
- Archive of all Background Mode Shows.
- Background Mode at iTunes.
- Send your comments to [email protected] or [email protected]
Thank you! I enjoyed that very much and I echo Mike’s comment.
This is an incredibly enlightening and entertaining interview! Highly recommended.