12.4.12

Rebel without a Specola Vaticana

I stumbled upon a review of the inauguration of two new telescopes of the Vatican observatory at Castel Gondolfo in the mid 1930's. The Specola Vaticana at that time had a Zeiss Visual Refractor Telescope (aperture 40mm, focal lenght 600mm, and a Zeiss double astrograph installed in the pope's summer residence 24 km south of Rome. It chose this location and moved out of the Vatican gardens because of light pollution tightening the grip on modern Rome.
The article contained a picture of Pope Pius XI standing outside the observatory talking to father Johannes Stein, the Dutch director of the Vatican Observatory. It reminded me of another scene in front of an observatory. I was thinking of the famous knife fighting scene in Rebel without a cause at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.
Sure, James Dean is no pope (and vice versa), but there is an eery similarity between the two settings...

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