Quotes About Astronomer

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.

Just as an astronomer, alone in an observatory, watches night after night through a telescope the myriads of stars, their mysterious movements, their changeful medley, their extinction and their flaming-up anew, so did Jacob Mendel, seated at his table in the Cafe Gluck, look through his spectacles into the universe of books, a universe that lies above the world of our everyday life, and, like the stellar universe, is full of changing cycles.

Ever since Darwin, we've been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.

The final answer was actually given by Edgar Allan Poe in 1848. Being an amateur astronomer, he was fascinated by the paradox and said that the night sky is black because, if we travel back in time far enough, we eventually encounter a cutoff—that is, a beginning to the universe. In other words, the night sky is black because the universe has a finite age.

The first two letters of the name Pluto are the initials of Percival Lowell. Its symbol is , a planetary monogram. But Lowell's lifelong love was the planet Mars. He was electrified by the announcement in 1877 by an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, of canali on Mars.

On the contrary, you speak so beautifully that I could listen all day.' The astronomer threw a searching glance upon her for a moment; but there was no satire in the warm soft eyes which met his own with a luxurious contemplative interest. 'Say more of it to me,' she continued, in a voice not far removed from coaxing.

Albert of Wallenstein] loved war. He was very tall and skeletally thin, usually dressed in sinister black, with a single streak of red. "[He is] unmerciful," wrote the astronomer Johannes Kepler, describing Wallenstein, "devoted only to himself and his desires...covetous, deceitful...usually silent, often violent.

The astonished astronomer who made the discovery was left with one all-important question: is it more appropriate to e-mail, call, or text your boss that the world is about to end?

More and more, the universe looks like a great thought rather than a great machine," says astronomer Sir James Jeans.

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel

The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world's rim; and strange winds, blowing from a gulf no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the grey dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark orb-like mountains which rise from its wrinkled and pitted plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids. - The Abominations of Yondo

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with such applause in the lecture room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

If the facts of Scripture are what Augustinians believe them to be, then the Augustinian system is the only possible system of theology. If those facts be what Romanists or Remonstrants take them to be, then their system is the only true one. It is important that the theologian should know his place. He is not master of the situation. He can no more construct a system of theology to suit his fancy, than the astronomer can adjust the mechanism of the heavens according to his own good pleasure.

Edwin Hubble, who continues to give me great faith in humanity, because he started out as a lawyer and then became an astronomer.

Halley had become England's second astronomer royal in 1720, after John Flamsteed's death. The puritanical Flamsteed had reason to roll over in his grave at this development, since in life he had denounced Halley for drinking brandy and swearing "like a sea-captain." And of course Flamsteed never forgave Halley, or his accomplice Newton, for pilfering the star catalogs and publishing them against his will.

My first dream as a child was to become a pilot. My second dream was to become an astronomer, and I pursued in parallel efforts and studies in these two areas.

the most famous of all those who had an acquaintance with cryptology in the Middle Ages was an English customs official, amateur astronomer, and literary genius named Geoffrey Chaucer.

Marx was an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.

For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study.

I look upward ignorantly but reverently at the white host of heaven. Even the astronomer who peers through the magic glasses must go in peril of losing his mysterious awe in a tangle of mathematical calculations.