Using excerpts from a letter written by famed astronomer Galileo in 1615, two modern-day astronomers explore the relationship between science and faith, arguing that our notion of ultimate truth must include both the physical and spiritual domains.

Stars are Small Dark-Coloured Things That Live in Holes in the Ground.- Shrouds of the Night - Galaxies and Rene Magritte.- Twin Masks of Spiral Structure? A Local Perspective.- The Mask of Complexity in Disk Galaxies.- Cosmic Magnetic Fields - An Overview.- The Gaseous Halo Mask.- Molecular Gas Properties of Galaxies: The SMA CO(2-1) B0DEGA Legacy Project.- The DiVA's Mask: Iconifying Galaxies and Revealing HI Anomalies.- Enigmatic Masks of Cosmic Dust: Lessons from Nearby Galaxies Through the Eyes of the Spitzer Space Telescope.- The Large Magellanic Cloud: A Power Spectral Analysis of Spitzer Images.- Light Cores Behind Dark Masks.- Globalization, Open Access Publishing, and the Disappearance of Print: Threat or Opportunity?.- Super Star Clusters and Supernovae in Interacting LIRGs Unmasked by NIR Adaptive Optics.- Structure, Mass, and Stability of Galactic Disks.- What Can the Radial Surface Brightness Profiles of Galaxy Discs Tell Us About Their Evolution?.- The Complex Interplay of Dust and Star Light in Spiral Galaxy Discs.- Galaxy Morphology Revealed By SDSS: Blue Elliptical Galaxies.- Rings and Bars: Unmasking Secular Evolution of Galaxies.- Bars and Bulges Through Masks of Time.- Tidal Trails and Mass-Segregated Isothermal Clusters.- Stellar Debris Streams: New Probes of Galactic Structure and Formation.- Chemical Enrichment in Galaxies: Constraints on Nucleogenesis and Galaxy Evolution.- Chemodynamical Simulations of Galaxies.- Elemental Abundance Patterns of Disk Substructure.- Searching for Structures and Streams in the Extended Solar Neighbourhood with RAVE.- On the Age-Metallicity-Velocity Relation in the Nearby Disk Using the RAVE Survey.- The HERMES Project: Reconstructing Galaxy Formation.- Stellar Halos: Unmasking a Galaxy's History.- The Outer Halos of Elliptical Galaxies.- Galaxies: Lighthouses in the Shoals of Dark Halos.- Dark Haloes as Seen with Gravitational Lensing.- Behind the Mask: Resolving the Core-Cusp Problem in Spiral Galaxies.- A GALAXY BASELINE: Multiwavelength Study of a Sample of the Most Isolated Galaxies in the Local Universe.- Diffuse Light and Galaxy Interactions in the Core of Nearby Clusters.- Feedback in Star and Galaxy Formation.- When Bad Masks Turn Good.- Spitzer's View of Galaxies in the High-Redshift Universe.- Bandshifting and Other Masks of the Clumpy Populations in High-Redshift Galaxies.- Supernovae, Dust, and Cosmology.

The year: 1660. The date: November 28. Present: The Lord Brouncker, Mr Boyle, Mr Bruce, Sir Robert Moray, Sir Paule Neile, Dr Wilkins, Dr Goddard, Dr Petty, Mr Ball, Mr Hooke, Mr Wren, and Mr Hill. Occasion: A lecture by Mr Wren at Gresham College, United Kingdom. AfterChristopherWrenhaddeliveredhislectureatGreshamCollegeonthathistoric occasion in November 1660, "they did according to the usual manner, withdraw for mutual converse." It was in 1660 that the Royal Society was founded, with 12 persons present. This year, 2010, is thus a special year for scientists worldwide: it celebrates the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society, whose current President is Martin Rees. One of the enormous challenges facing scientists in the 1600s was the great need fortheclassi cationofobjectstheywerestudying,particularlyinthe eldofbotany. The seeds for classi cation lie in the works of the British naturalist John Ray (1628-1705), who commencing in 1660 with hisCatalogusplantarumcirca Cantabrigiamnascentium (Catalogue of Cambridge Plants) - published in the year in which the Royal Society was founded - and ending with the posthumous publi- tion ofSynopsisMethodicaAviumetPiscium in 1713, pioneered systematic studies on plants, birds, mammals, sh, and insects.