In March, Fr Richard Boyle was getting ready for the four-hour drive from our Tucson community to our telescope on Mount Graham when word came that the mountaintop observatory was closing down. The Covid-19 outbreak had made it dangerous for support staff to work up there, so isolated and so far from medical attention. Since then, the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT) has been shuttered.

The human cost of the pandemic trumps all; it touched us personally when one of our staff lost his brother to Covid in April. But astronomy has also suffered.

Fr Boyle had been planning to observe the ancient galactic star cluster, NGC 188, and then begin work on an international collaboration called “EDEN” – the Exoearth Discovery and Exploration Network. Its goal is to observe all the M class (red dwarf) stars within 50 light years of us and see if there are any Earth-sized planets in their habitable zones. But now we won’t know. Not this year.