Quotes About Astronomy

The word planet should be reserved for the small number of truly important things in the solar system.

Craters on Mercury have to be named for deceased poets; moon of Uranus are named for Shakespearean characters. For this type of object in the Kuiper belt, the rules said that the name had to be a creation deity in a mythology

Finding something spherical in space indicates that you have found a place where gravity has taken over.

But figuring out where to point the telescopes in the first place and why you're doing it is much harder.

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.

The author explains the evidence for they would help from astronomy. He says that if planets are behaving in a way that cannot be explained by what is already known, then another planet is searched for which would explain their behavior. This, he says, is actually how the more distant planets were discovered. We look, then, for something that would explain what is not inexplicable from what we already see.

if an astronomer calculates from the sky he will ascertain the paths of the moon and the stars; but in his house the womenfolk are at variance, and he does not perceive their various misconduct.

Astronomers always work in the past; because light takes time to move from one place to another, they see things as they were, not as they are.

Warf. The space

To doubt that life evolved, even if some of the details described in this book may yet prove wrong, is to doubt the convergence of evidence, from molecules to men, from bacteria to planetary systems. It is to doubt the evidence of biology, and its concordance with physics and chemistry, geology and astronomy. It is to doubt the veracity of experiment and observation, to doubt the testing in reality. It is, in the end, to doubt reality.

For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study.

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.

Mankind will discover objects in space sent to us by the watchers...

So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.

Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appearance, for all the stars directly behind me were now deep red, while those directly ahead were violet. Rubies lay behind me, amethysts ahead of me.

For our astronomers assure us that in this boundless finitude which we call the cosmos the straight lines of light lead not to infinity but to their source.

The slowest-spinning object in the known universe is the nearest planet, Venus. A person could walk faster than it rotates.

The middle of the next century must be taken as the real dawn of modern science; for the year 1543 marks the publication of the life-work of Copernicus. Nicolas Copernik was his proper name. Copernicus

rushing along its annual course round the sun at the rate of nineteen miles every second.

Jupiter takes 4332 days to make one revolution); then

Copernicus lived from 1473 to 1543, and

Tycho Brahé from 1546 to 1601. Kepler from 1571 to 1630. Galileo from 1564 to 1642. Gilbert from 1540 to 1603. Francis Bacon from 1561 to 1626. Descartes from 1596 to 1650.

We have seen how Copernicus placed the earth in its true position in the solar system, making

Ptolemaic system continued