Quotes About Astronomy

They've discovered that, where all the other galaxies are moving in one direction, ours is going in another. Now, the Big Bang theory says that we're all moving outward.

Therefore, having obtained the opportunity from these sources, I too began to consider the mobility of the earth.

In the field of astronomy in the mid-'60s, quasars were very sexy objects - gigantic, star-like masses about which little was known. I was a graduate research student at Cambridge working towards my Ph.D. and chose quasars as the subject for my thesis. Part of my project involved surveying the sky for them using a radio telescope.

The Martian atmosphere is very thin. It's like our atmosphere at 100,000 feet.

I thought I'd better check this third plate, which is another date, see if there's an image there in the right place that would be consistent with the images on the other plates. That was the final proof.

The dark areas, the 'mare' plains of the moon, are so incredibly smooth that the English astronomer Thomas Gold has suggested that they might really be depressions filled to the brim with dust. A rocket hit would show whether they are that or not.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

It used to be that, in astronomy, a small team of people could look at photos of a few thousand galaxies and classify and catalog them relatively easily. But now, with a new generation of robotic telescopes scanning the skies constantly and producing millions of images, that's become next to impossible.

People presume we've been somehow monitoring the entire sky at all frequencies, all the time, but we haven't yet been able to do any of those things. The fact is, all the SETI efforts to date have only closely examined a couple thousand nearby stars, and we're only just now learning which of those might have promising planets.

I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight. I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both.

In the four years since its launch, Kepler has chalked up 122 new and confirmed planets. It's also caught the scent of nearly three thousand additional objects, of which probably 80 percent or more will turn out to be other-worldly orbs.

Without the idea of the indefinite, mathematics would have halted at addition and subtraction, and never have risen through geometry to astronomy.

a worldwide flood destroyed all life on earth about five thousand years ago requires denying an immense amount of generally accepted knowledge—from astronomy, physics, geology, paleontology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, cave paintings, and more.

A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth

And while people ran about proclaiming such things,] I could only think that everything exists because of loss. From the bricks of our buildings, from cement to human cells, everything exists because of chemical transformation, and every chemical transformation is accompanied by loss. And when I look up at the night sky I think: The astronomers have given every star a number.

What you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know. It is especially different for those of us whose grasp of astronomy is so frail that, given a flashlight, a grapefruit, two oranges, and fifteen years, we still could not figure out which way to set the clocks for Daylight Saving Time.

Said about Napier's logarithms: . . . by shortening the labors doubled the life of the astronomer.

I am in love with the stars of night - I have made them audible...

It is because the ancients made astronomical calculations in base 60 that we still use this system for measuring time, dividing an hour into 60 minutes, and a minute into 60 seconds. In its path through the heavens, the sun takes roughly 360 days (actually 365.242199) to describe a complete circle, so it seems that the Babylonians divided a complete circle into 360 degrees (°).

CHAPTER 1 Signs in the Heavens

The ancient Maya were superb stargazers. Their calendar synchronized not just the Sun and Moon, byt also Venus and Mars. They worked out that 81 (or 3X3X3X3) full moons occur exactly every 2,392 (or 8X13X23) days, an astonishingly accurate gearing.

Did you know that a bee dies after he stings you? And that there's a star called Aldebaran? And that around the tenth of August, any year, you can look up in the sky at night and see dozens and dozens of shooting stars?

I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

And every minute Newton didn't spend working on optics, physics, astronomy (including inventing the reflecting telescope), some harmless alchemy, and other sidebars of his mathematical discipline, he spent furtively studying the Bible and church history.