Quotes About Astronomy

How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.

That is one of the things that has come out of the discovery of pulsars - more knowledge about the space between the stars.

I'm fascinated by the deaths of stars and the havoc they wreak on their environments.

The thing I like about astronomy is being outside at night and seeing the stars in a dark sky. It makes you feel small.

It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

We forget how recently astronomers figured out what the stars are made of, what makes them shine, how distant they are, how they are born, and whether they remain immutable or evolve and die.

The stars handle it very graciously. They let you know. They know how to play the game.

My whole entry into astronomy started from a spiritual place.

There is still some gravity where we are and even as far out as our moon. That is why our moon stays in orbit around the Earth. We don't feel the gravity up here because it is so much smaller than the force we feel when we are on the Earth.

The great spirals... apparently lie outside our stellar system.

Thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

I sat on the bank, holding the stone, and tried to list to myself the motions that were at that moment acting upon it: the Earth's 700-miles-per-hour spin around its axis, its 67,000-miles-per-hour orbit about the sun, its slow precessional straightening tilt within inertial space, and, containing all of that, the galaxy's own inestimable movement outward in the deep night of space.

He [Ludwig Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question: "Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?" I replied: "I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth." "Well," he asked, "what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?" —ELIZABETH ANSCOMBE,

That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology.

The ancient books of the Chinese show that astronomy was not only understood by them at a very early period, but that it formed an important branch of state policy, and the basis of public ceremonies. Eclipses are accurately recorded which occurred twenty centuries before Jesus;

Of course you don't make any noise in space, because there's no air.

Over years, the noise level will be brought down, and LIGO will be three times better and see three times farther.

I'm not really into sci-fi movies, but I'm into the science of space a lot. I love astronomy and thinking about the nothingness of the everythingness of space.

My desire is to bring astronomical events and objects down into your personal, lived-in space.

It is of great importance to note these meteors, even the small ones, as very little is yet known of them; and every observation, if carefully made, will some day help to show what they are.

After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain.

Foreign stars in the nights down there. A whole new astronomy Mensa, Musca, the Chameleon. Austral constellations nigh unknown to northern folk. Wrinkling, fading, through the cold black waters. As he rocks in his rusty pannier to the sea's floor in a drifting stain of guano. What family has no mariner in its tree? No fool, no felon. No fisherman.

The astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that "nature loves simplicity and unity." So did Steve Jobs.

Back in 1917, when Einstein had analyzed the "cosmological considerations" arising from his general theory of relativity, most astronomers thought that the universe consisted only of our Milky Way, floating with its 100 billion or so stars in a void of empty space.