Pope Gregory XIII Pope Gregory XIII, originally the Bolognese Ugo Boncompagni (b. 1502), reigned as pope from 1572 until his death in 1585. In 1582 Gregory promulgated a new calendar which entailed small but crucially important corrections to the Julian calendar which...
By the early 1900s there were four telescope domes on the walls of the Vatican: The equatorial photographic telescope Carte du Ciel was located on the Leonine Tower, which was later renamed the Tower of St John. A large refracting telescope, the Visuale, was sited on...
This telescope, manufactured by the famous Merz firm of Munich, has an aperture of 10 cm and a focal length of 1.5 m, with an equatorial mount. Inscribed on the tube is G. Merz & Söhne in München. It is one of the telescopes that was acquired from the estate of...
Meridian Circle Telescope Meridian telescopes like this one were used in the 19th century to determine sidereal time by observing the precise moment when stars of known location exactly crossed the meridian. This telescope was made at the Vienna Polytechnic in 1862...
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