#telescope

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#hence #microscope #past #past time #present

Tears are often the telescope by which men see far into heaven. ↗

— Henry Ward Beecher

#far #heaven #into #men #often

Similar to the telescope or the telephone, television enables us to see or hear things we never dreamed of. When you look at the details, a concrete scene between people is really something incredibly unlikely, something subtle that requires extended description. ↗

— Alexander Kluge

#concrete #description #details #dreamed #enables

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

For a long time, we've worked on detecting planets with whatever was at hand, making use of existing small telescopes or even amateur telescopes. It's time to move on to the next stage. ↗

— Andrew Gould

#detecting #even #existing #hand #long

Now, almost one hundred years later, it is difficult to fully appreciate how much our picture of the universe has changed in the span of a single human lifetime. As far as the scientific community in 1917 was concerned, the universe was static and eternal, and consisted of a one single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by vast, infinite, dark, and empty space. This is, after all, what you would guess by looking up at the night sky with your eyes, or with a small telescope, and at the time there was little reason to suspect otherwise. ↗

— Lawrence M. Krauss

#milky-way #science #telescope #universe #change

For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift. ↗

— Wernher von Braun

#best #confirmation #first #get #gift

(Popular singer Eddie Fisher, appearing on This is Show Business, told Kaufman that women refused to date him because he looked so young.) Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars up to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the construction of the Mount Palomar telescope, an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope - Mr Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn't be able to detect my interest in your problem. ↗

— George S. Kaufman

#telescopes #business

The development of the telescope, together with increased knowledge of things, brought men to see that the earth is not what man had once thought it to be. ↗

— Joseph Franklin Rutherford

#development #earth #had #increased #knowledge

Unlike what you may be told in other sectors of life, when observing the universe, size does matter, which often leads to polite ‘telescope envy’ at gatherings of amateur astronomers. ↗

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

#neil-degrasse-tyson #physics #telescope #universe #life