#astronomy

I went to the University of Washington as a physics and astronomy major. My other interest, of course, was aviation. I always wanted to be a pilot. And if you're going to fly airplanes, the best place to be is the Air Force. ↗

— Michael P. Anderson

#air force #always #astronomy #aviation #best

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. ↗

— Edsger Dijkstra

#about #astronomy #computer #computer science #more

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. ↗

— Nicolaus Copernicus

#another #anything #astronomy #cannot #certain

You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison." What monsters may they be?" Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that there are things much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky... In these our sight plunges quite beyond any twinkler we have yet visited. Those deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alone the human body! and think of the side caverns and secondary abysses to right and left as you pass on!... There is a size at which dignity begins," he exclaimed; "further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying that those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a new horror? ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#science #size #universe #imagination

The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#human-life #life #science #life

Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets. ↗

— Stephen Leacock

#correct #planets #sun #teaches #use

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons. ↗

— Edwin Powell Hubble

#history #horizons #receding #the history of

I turned my attention for a while to gamma ray astronomy and soon began the first in a continous series of experiments at the Savannah River site to study the properties of the neutrino. ↗

— Frederick Reines

#attention #began #experiments #first #gamma

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. ↗

— Octavia Butler

#because #came #discovered #early #fantasy

... the blast signatures of a detonated supernova and that of a nuclear bomb are identical. ↗

— Eric Chaisson

#nuclear-bomb #supernova #age