Quotes About Astronomy

Shuttling back and forth in the equatorial plane where the brilliant stars of Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto - worlds that elsewhere would have counted as planets in their own right, but which here were merely satellites of a giant master.

classical Hohmann orbit—

I'm only an ex-astronomer;

All that happened was that as the sun passed the meridian at Cape Town it went out. There remained visible merely a pale, purple ghost, giving no heat or light.

forth in the equatorial plane were the brilliant stars

Para todos os outros olhos, Saturno sempre havia mostrado todo o seu disco iluminado, inteiramente virado para o Sol. Agora ele era um arco delicado, com os anéis formando uma linha fina que o cortava - como uma flecha prestes a ser disparada, na face do próprio Sol. Também na linha dos anéis estava a estrela brilhante de Titã, e às fagulhas mais fracas das outras luas.

All greek civilization is a search for bridges to relate human misery and divine perfection. Their art, which is incomparable, their poetry, their philosophy, the sciences which they invented (geometry, astronomy, mechanics, physics, biology) are nothing but bridges.

The universe is eight billion years old, the last two billion of which have produced intelligent life. During this time not one hour of absolute equity has prevailed.

The starry copeOf heaven.

It was the first Cirocco had seen her less than happy with what she'd seen through a telescope.

Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?

Be able to recognize many of the major constellations and know the stories behind them.

When we look out into space, we're looking back in time; the light from a galaxy a billion light-years away, for instance, will take a billion years to reach us. It's an amazing thing. The history is there for us to see. It's not mushed up like the geologic record of Earth. You can just see it exactly as it was.

If we found a hazardous asteroid, we could nudge it out of the way.

I am an astronomer, and my job is to look to the heavens to better understand the universe and our place in it.

There were aging orange embers, blue dwarfs, twin yellow giants. There were collapsing neutron stars, and angry supernovae that hissed into the icy emptiness. There were borning stars, breathing stars, pulsing stars, and dying stars. There was the Death Star. At

I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.

Every time I'd read about the stone circles, it would describe how they worked as an astronomical observance. For example, some of the circles are oriented so that at the winter solstice, the sun will strike a standing stone.

I made observations for three hours last night, and am almost ill today from fatigue; still I have worked all day, trying to reduce the places, and mean to work hard again tonight.

We may have a tacit understanding of how our solar system works, but watching the sun disappear behind the moon reminds us of the vastness of space and the enduring mysteries of the universe we inhabit.

I think it's amazing that the entire community of astronomy has done what it's done. We've been able to deduce the nature of time and space and where we all came from. It's the most amazing detective story in history.

The squares of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances.

The radius vector describes equal areas in equal times.

The sun is 91 million miles away; not too far, not too close. Be like that