Quotes About Astronomy

I've been a space enthusiast since I was in kindergarten.

The sun is back at its original o'clock.

The high success of Newton's astronomy was in one way an intellectual disaster: it produced an illusion from which we tend still to suffer. This illusion was created by the circumstance that Newton's mechanics had a good model in the solar system. For this gave the impression that we had an ideal of scientific explanation; whereas the truth was, it was mere obligingness on the part of the solar system, by having had so peaceful a history in recorded time, to provide such a model.

I've loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon.

The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.

If you had a piece of neutron star about the size of a grape, it would weigh 100 million tonnes.

So, for instance, even though the Earth is travelling in a straight line through space, space itself is curved, so the planet orbits the bowling ball of the Sun. It is a simple, but astonishing observation. Planets move in straight lines. There really is no force pulling them into an orbit. It's just that the space their straight line path runs through gets twisted.

Astronomy is what we have now instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts are nil'.

dwarf galaxies, have as few as ten million stars. The biggest, the giants, have been estimated to contain in the region of 100 trillion.

we now suspect that Mercury, the innermost planet, began life much further out and was deflected inwards to its present-day seared orbit.

There are three known planets in the PSR B1257 system, which have been named Draugr, Poltergeist and Phobetor. Poltergeist was the first to be discovered. I know, I was curious about their names as well. Poletrgeist means "pounding ghost". The draugr are the unded in Norse legends who live in their graves. And Phobetor is the personification of nightmares, and the son of Nyx, Greek goddess of the night. Astronomers are goths.

Host of heaven" was a term that referred to astronomical bodies that were also considered to be gods or members of the divine council.[8] The Encyclopedia Judaica notes that, "in many cultures the sky, the sun, the moon, and the known planets were conceived as personal gods. These gods were responsible for all or some aspects of existence. Prayers were addressed to them, offerings were made to them, and their opinions on important matters were sought through divination."[9]

I didn't understand how you could be an actor if you didn't also study philosophy and study political science, astronomy. And also just go out and live life and have experiences.

Il est des soirs de printemps dont le crépuscule outrepasse les limites que lui prescrit l'astronomie.

It is the closest place to the stars on Earth. (Kalkan)

S]till the Pole Star leers down from the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.

We were suddenly faced with the necessity of training a lot of young men in the art of navigation.

You know, there was a time, just before I started to study physical science, when astronomers thought that systems such as we have here in the solar system required a rare triple collision of stars.

So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

As the writer Arthur Koestler astutely observed, "Johannes Kepler became enamored with the Pythagorean dream, and on this foundation of fantasy, by methods of reasoning equally unsound, built the solid edifice of modern astronomy. It is one of the most astonishing episodes in the history of thought, and an antidote to the pious belief that the Progress of Science is governed by logic.

The real difference between Aristarchus and today's astronomers and physicists is not that his observational data were in error, but that he never tried to judge the uncertainty in them, or even acknowledged that they might be imperfect.

La diferencia fundamental entre la ciencia de Aristarco y la nuestra no son los errores de sus observaciones. Algunos errores esporádicos graves siguen afectando a la observación astronómica y la física experimental[...]. La verdadera diferencia entre Aristarco y los astrónomos y físicos de la actualidad no es que los datos de sus observaciones fueran erróneos, sino que jamás los puso en duda, y ni siquiera reconoció que pudieran ser imperfectos.

Even before the start of history, the sky must have been commonly used as a compass, a clock, and a calendar. It could not have been difficult to notice that the Sun rises every morning in more or less the same direction, that during the day one can tell how much time there is before night from the height of the Sun in the sky, and that hot weather will follow the time of year when the day lasts longest.