Quotes About Astronomy

In college, what had always stuck with him in Astronomy 101 was that the first astronomers to think of points of light not as part of a celestial tapestry revolving around the earth but as individual planets had had to wrench their imaginations--and thus their analogies and metaphors--out of a grooved track that had been running through everyone's minds for hundreds and hundreds of years.

build-your-own-telescope

When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion.

Scientists normally like to do experiments. You know, they like to mix this with that and see what happens. They like to take this thing and poke it and see how it reacts. In astronomy, we can't do that. The stars, the planets, the galaxies, are so far away that we just look at them, and we have to learn things by looking at them.

The most exciting thing that we have found with Cassini is the geological activity, the geysering activity at the south pole of Enceladus.

It's always snowing at the south pole of Enceladus.

There are amateurs who have seen that one of Uranus' poles is brighter than the other, or who have seen cloud formations on the planet. For all we know, interesting things are happening there all the time.

I've always been consumed by things that are out of this world, like space and moons.

When I was a little kid, we only knew about our nine planets. Since then, we've downgraded Pluto but have discovered that other solar systems and stars are common. So life is probably quite prevalent.

One of the first thoughts I had, when doing early exoplanet research, was that Earth and its many companions seemed very different from the planetary systems we were detecting.

It's quite likely that planets and solar systems like ours could be forming in other galaxies in great numbers.

Some asteroids have us in their sights. Be nice to sort of go near them and find out what they're made of, possibly tag their ears so they're always broadcasting to us their location. In case one of their trajectories head straight for us, we'll know well in advance to do something about it.

If you slid Pluto to where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate that ice, and it would grow a tail. Now that's no kind of behavior for a planet.

There are reasons, increasing in number and quality, to believe that the masses of ordinary galaxies may have been underestimated by a factor of 10 or more.

Cantus astronomicus, domine astronomy . . ." She was chanting what seemed to be a mix of ersatz Latin and Standard. I knelt

I kept my mind on the moon.

He was staring over the bulge of the Earth at a curved horizon; he vas seeing the Earth as round.

He was staring over the bulge of the Earth at a curved horizon; he was seeing the Earth as round.

A falling star was a failed star, a cinder burning in the atmosphere.

one star appears to stand almost overhead hour after hour, night after night, seemingly never moving even as the others circle perpetually around it. In recognition thereof, it is dubbed Polaris, the pole star ...

They noticed that Earth tilted in relation to the sun, offering first one hemisphere and then the other over the course of the year ...

Every astronomer loves the stars.

Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram. Harmakhis, Hrad, Huo Hsing, Kasei. Ma'adim, Maja, Mamers, Mangala. Mawrth, Nirgal, Shalbatanu, Simud and Tiu.

NOTE: Islamic and Chinese calendars are lunar. Christian and Buddhist calendars are solar.