John Updike Quotes

It feels great to discover a planet, just like any discovery in science, except that it has more of the feel of exploration - you can go back and look at it. However, I can never visit.

If you asked a sample of Americans "What is the temperature of Mars?" about 8% would say they don't know.

Mars has been flown by, orbited, smacked into, radar inspected, and rocketed onto, as well as bounced upon, rolled over, shoveled, drilled into, baked, and even laser blasted.

My parents gave me a small telescope, then I built my own, and one thing led to another. So that's how I ended up going from being a hobby astronomer to a professional astronomer.

I got interested in astronomy at the age of 8 because I was looking at an atlas of the planets in my parents' apartment in Arlington, where I grew up. I got a telescope at age 10, which is pretty normal, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I had already seen a lot of cheesy sci-fi films.

When I was little, I wanted to be an astronomer, but that didn't happen.

We've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives, from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies. But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space, we have no sense of what space sounds like.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

Yesterday, we sought telescopes good enough to see all the planets. Today, we seek vehicles good enough to reach them.

You cannot exploit the advantages of getting above the atmosphere unless you are able to get up there reasonably large-sized telescopes and unless you are able to keep these telescopes pointing at one region of the sky for long periods of time to a high degree of accuracy.

When I first went to Hubble, as an astronomer and as a scientist, it was a dream come true. And as an astronaut, the Hubble missions are premiere missions because Hubble is so important to science, so important to humanity, that it's just a very special event. But as an astronomer, it was sort of the holy grail of missions.

We really have only been observing Neptune with big telescopes since shortly before 1989.

There are other planets besides the Earth and Mars. I'd like to remind you that studying Venus is vital to understanding life elsewhere.

Hubble made my career.

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.

While I was there, Voyager flew by Saturn. I got involved with a person who was a member of the imaging team and started working on data from Saturn. With all that data coming in, the imaging team didn't have enough hands or scientists to work on all of it.

The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.

There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth.

Mars is essentially in the same orbit. Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water.

The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience.

I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. [Kepler's epitaph]

I don't believe space exists. You're not gonna put a camera on a roomba, stick it in the desert, and tell me it's Mars.

Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies! Oh look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

I was studying the sky like I was an astronomer, except it was daytime and I didn't have a telescope, so I was just an idiot.

Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.