#astronomy

Astronomy's much more fun when you're not an astronomer. ↗

— Brian May

#astronomy #fun #more #much #you

In 1959 the University recognized our work by appointing me to a new Chair of Radio Astronomy. ↗

— Martin Ryle

#astronomy #chair #me #new #our

Until very recently, the heavenly bodies have been investigated only with reference to their position and their laws of motion, and a quarter of a century ago astronomy was little more than celestial topography. ↗

— George Phillips Bond

#astronomy #been #bodies #celestial #century

Interviewer: "Didn't [Sagan] want to believe?" Druyan: "He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know. ↗

— Ann Druyan

#astronomy #atheism #carl-sagan #science #science

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar. ↗

— Brad Leithauser

#astronomy #chile #metaphor #novelists #telescope

Everything in this room is edible. Even I'm edible. But, that would be called canibalism. It is looked down upon in most societies. ↗

— Tim Burton

#gluttony #humor #manners #humor

We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. ↗

— Tombstone epitaph of two amateur astronomers

#death #finality #hope #love #stars

The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#immortality #science #death

who knows if the moon's a balloon,coming out of a keen city in the sky--filled with pretty people? ( and if you and I should get into it,if they should take me and take you into their balloon, why then we'd go up higher with all the pretty people than houses and steeples and clouds: go sailing away and away sailing into a keen city which nobody's ever visited,where always it's Spring)and everyone's in love and flowers pick themselves ↗

— E.E. Cummings

#balloon #flowers #hot-air-balloon #luna #lunar

It's amazing to me that we humans have the intellectual capacity to ask deep questions and to devise methods for learning how the universe works and how its contents evolve with time. ↗

— Alex Filippenko

#science #the-universe #science