Quotes About Astronomy

An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star's life.

Britain has still got rather fewer astronomers than many other countries - the French and the Italians, for example. Why is that? I don't think those countries have better brains.

Most astronomical work has to do with things that are very, very far away and don't affect our lives very much.

All the nine-planet people out there: Get over it. There's eight.

But I will confess that I began as an astronomer—a liking for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things, a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit— and that my longing for you has not taken me very far from that original desire to inscribe a comet's orbit around the walls of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.

Did you see the comet about half a year ago?" she asked. "The one that looked like an extra moon in the sky?

The U.S. space probe Meanderer J I, after a journey of six years and many millions of miles, passes within 400 miles of the surface of Neptune, sending back dramatic color photographs of a Delta Air Lines jet.

Why did we do that to Pluto? We had it good with Pluto.

And the stars look very different today.

The stars were better company anyway. They were very beautiful, and they almost never snored.

A significant part of the problem was the weird nature of the Moon's mass that was not at all what was expected. Instead of a generally constant gravitational field such as the Earth exhibits across its surface, the Moon is an inconsistent, lumpy ball that has huge variations in gravity from region to region.

Solar eclipses occur around two to five times per year but the area on the ground covered by the totality is very small, so in any given location on Earth a total eclipse will only happen once every 360 years.

Okay. I've got one. Do you think Pluto should still be considered an actual planet in its own right?" "Much better. And yes, I do. I had to memorize the planets when I was in third grade, and it was one of them, and I don't like having to relearn things.

Astronomers saw me that way. "Cliff, he's not much of an astronomer, but what a computer hacker!" (The computer folks, of course, had a different view: "Cliff's not much of a programmer, but what an astronomer!" At best, graduate school had taught me to keep both sides fooled.)

Ich langte in meine Tasche nach einem Milky Way - was sonst für einen Astronomen - und machte es mir bequem, um den Hacker auf meinem grünen Monitor zu beobachten.

intihuatana, or 'the place to which the sun is tied'.

He shook his head without looking at her. "Did you know there are different names for different moons? This month it's going to be the Hunter's Moon, but March has the Worm Moon and the Crow Moon. May has the Milk Moon, July the Mead Moon. February has the Hunger Moon and late October the Blood Moon. Aren't they lovely names? Aren't they something, Hazel? Aren't they warning enough?

All of the stars rotate, have orbits around the center of the galaxy, and most of them go around the center of the galaxy in nearly circular orbits. They vary a little bit from circular, but they're predominantly circular.

The sun and its retinue of planets drift as a group through the vast gulfs of space that separate the stars.

Indeed, the night sky is the part of our environment that's been common to all cultures throughout human history. All have gazed up at the 'vault of heaven' and interpreted it in their own way.

Earth is going to lose its oceans in the future, just as Venus did in the past. How long planets retain their oceans is a function of distance from the sun, all other things being equal.

The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.

When you look at Venus and the Earth, they formed at about the same place in the solar system. They're made of about the same materials; they're about the same size.

A lot of work and money has been spent on astronomy and yet we have not found life. So we are rare, and rare things tend to be fragile and you have to be careful about them