Edmond Halley Quotes

The stars look the same from night to night. Nebulae and galaxies are dully immutable, maintaining the same overall appearance for thousands or millions of years. Indeed, only the sun, moon and planets - together with the occasional comet, asteroid or meteor - seem dynamic.

But my most favourite pursuit, after my daily exertions at the Foundry, was Astronomy. There were frequently clear nights when the glorious objects in the Heavens were seen in most attractive beauty and brilliancy.

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

You can enjoy stargazing just by going out and learning a couple constellations with your kids.

I do not remember exactly when I became interested in astronomy, but I know it was at a very young age. I did organize an astronomy club for my friends at the age of 11. We would meet once a week to learn about the constellations.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

When Galileo first trained his optic telescope on the heavens and opened up modern optical astronomy, that was the first of the electromagnetic windows out of the universe: light.

I had the usual friends who pointed out constellations of stars. But it really was watching the stars. It was getting some sense of the motion of the earth. I found it a remarkable thing.

We shouldn't persuade people that we can simply conjure up the sun and the moon: at the most, we can deliver a telescope.

I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.

My dad's a physicist and had a key to the St Andrew's observatory, and we used to pop down to see Halley's Comet and Saturn and meteor showers.

People know a planet when they see one, and I think that's a pretty darn good test, in fact, for planethood.

Astronomy is ... the only progressive Science which the ancient world produced.

As a navigator, I started studying astronomy because sometimes you're not able to use the equipment, so you'd have to do it the old-fashioned way, figuring out what you were seeing in the sky.

We may have a tacit understanding of how our solar system works, but watching the sun disappear behind the moon reminds us of the vastness of space and the enduring mysteries of the universe we inhabit.

I actually believe more in outer space in Virginia, because I can look up at the sky and count the stars.

I got into astronomy through an interest in religion.

I wanted to be an astronomer until I discovered I'm terrible at math.

I like to look at the skyline and the moon.

I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.

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.

I have a thing about stars, they are my favourite motif.

Planets' orbits are elliptical. It's a very pleasing shape.