Quotes About Astronomy

The sky was full of stars, and every star an exploding ship.

It can be said that we are all "star dust," the product of heavy element generation within previous generations of stars.

Before a war, military science seems a real science, like astronomy. After a war it seems more like astrology.

Unlike people from any other time in history, we know what we are looking at when we look up upon the night sky.

For NASA, space is still a high priority.

Growing up I was enthralled by the night sky. But now most of us can see only a few faint stars at night, the ones bright enough to make it through the domes of light that enclose our metropolises. For all of human history, the night sky told stories, delineated time, and guided voyagers. Now 30 percent of the people on the planet can't even see the Milky Way from their homes. And in the United States, 80 percent of us can't.

Yet if anyone believes that the earth rotates, surely he will hold that its motion is natural, not violent.

The cosmic game changed forever in 1992. Before then, logic told us that there had to be other planets besides the nine (if you still count poor Pluto) in our solar system, but until that year, when two astronomers detected faint, telltale radio signals in the constellation Virgo, we had no hard evidence of their existence.

Of all things visible, the highest is the heaven of the fixed stars.

It bears mentioning that the Milky Way is only one of 150 billion galaxies visible to our telescopes - and each of these will have its own complement of planets.

In 1860 a total eclipse of the sun was visible in British America.

Astronomers sometimes observe that a star of medium magnitude increases suddenly in size; a star invisible to the naked eye may become very brilliant and visible without any telescope - the appearance of a Nova.

Shooting stars are not stars at all. They're just rocks that eneter the atmosphere and catch fire under friction. What we wish on, when we see one, is just a trail of debris.

If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.

My father, a closet astronomer, has tried to explain black holes to me, how they are so heavy they absorb everything, even light, right into their center. Moments like this are the same kind of vacuum; no matter what you cling to, you wind up being sucked in.

I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth. Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here. [ Epitaph he composed for himself a few months before he died ]

The Earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides, is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.

If there is anything that can bind the mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living,—then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.

The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at one of the two foci.

I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure. Sky-bound was the mind, Earth-bound the body rests.

In 5-billion years the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.

To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?

The undevout astronomer must be mad.

would escape to his own private planet, Ro, where an imaginary astronomer friend, Zi, had finally succeeded in building a machine to convert radiant sunlight into moral strength. Using it to waft peace throughout the universe, Zi