Quotes About Astronomy

I fell in love with the night sky when I first looked through a telescope as a young girl growing up in Delhi.

Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again.

Astronomers are greatly disappointed when, having traveled halfway around the world to see an eclipse, clouds prevent a sight of it; and yet a sense of relief accompanies the disappointment.

No one working as an astronomer is shackled in chains. This is a tremendous profession. There are lots of neat people, and you get to do cool things. If I had to say something negative, it's that there's often a whole lot of travel that takes me away from my children. That can be a bummer a lot of times.

We should do astronomy because it is beautiful and because it is fun. We should do it because people want to know. We want to know our place in the universe and how things happen.

I was seeing more stars than Patrick Moore; he didn't half give me a sore fucking whack on the nut.

To the naked eye, the Milky Way looks like a haze of light, but turn your binoculars or telescope on it and wow! – you can see that it's full of stars. The light you see is the light from billions of stars, too far away for your eyes to make them out individually, but so abundant that you can still see their combined light.

I haven't experienced anything paranormal yet, but I did see what I think was a meteor light up the sky in a flash of red for a few seconds. That was really cool.

NEOCam wouldn't need cryogen, and it would also be able to see entirely new areas of space. It can scan the sky in a new way.

We've accounted for 95 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way. The other 5 percent are big, bright stars - the kind that dominate the night sky, but are lamentably both rare and short-lived. If biology's your thing, you can forget those guys.

Everybody has busy lives, but you can tell people, 'Go outside and look at the night sky. We've been able to demonstrate that every star you see probably has a planet around it.'

You cannot exploit the advantages of getting above the atmosphere unless you are able to get up there reasonably large-sized telescopes and unless you are able to keep these telescopes pointing at one region of the sky for long periods of time to a high degree of accuracy.

Every person who went into the space industry did so because they looked up at the sky and were fascinated by it - not because they wanted to make a military or commercial object.

I've been a stargazer for quite a long time, I've got the apps, I know where a lot of things are in the sky and the apps actually can help just to point out what you are looking at because then you do get to see, 'Oh that's Saturn, that's Mars.'

In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It's called the moon illusion.

The supermoon is a 16-inch pizza compared with a 15-inch pizza. It's a slightly bigger moon; I ain't using the adjective 'supermoon.'

As the Earth continues to slow, leap seconds will grow more common. Eventually we will need one every year, and then even more. Scientists could have avoided these awkward skips by choosing instead to adjust the duration of the second itself. Who would notice? That is what they did, in fact, until 1955.

Once every lunar eclipse, you should be able to see me smile!

Just one supernova can temporarily outshine an entire galaxy of 100 billion stars.

In other words, a star is a nuclear furnace, burning hydrogen fuel and creating nuclear ash in the form of waste helium. A star is also a delicate balancing act between the force of gravity, which tends to crush the star into oblivion, and the nuclear force, which tends to blow the star apart with the force of trillions of hydrogen bombs. A star then matures and ages as it exhausts its nuclear fuel.

One of the most beautiful photographs of a galactic black hole is the one taken by the Hubble space telescope of the galaxy NGC 4261.

It was Johannes Kepler who first noticed the effect when he realized that, contrary to expectations, comet tails always point away from the sun. Kepler correctly surmised that pressure from sunlight creates these tails by blowing dust and ice crystals in comets away from the sun.

The first people on the historic mission to Mars are probably alive today, perhaps learning about astronomy in high school.

Since photographs of galaxies only show the beautiful swirling mass of stars, whatever is holding the mass together must not interact with light—it must be invisible.