Last month Adam Hincks SJ, a cosmologist at the University of Toronto and an adjunct scholar of the Vatican Observatory, was in Castel Gandolfo with a student group. At the same time, Dr Maria Elena Monzani, of the SLAC Linear Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford (and another of our adjuncts), was coming to Italy as part of her ongoing application process to become a European Space Agency astronaut. Meanwhile, Paolo Beltrame SJ was in Rome visiting family; he’d earned a doctorate in high-energy physics before entering the Jesuits, is now finishing his theology studies in Paris, and this autumn he’ll be joining our observatory in Tucson to study cosmology. A rare alignment of the stars! So they all joined our resident cosmologist Fr Gabriele Gionti SJ and his colleague and Specola volunteer Fr Matteo Galaverni to talk shop.