Maria Mitchell Quotes

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 result was that, if it happened to clear off after a cloudy evening, I frequently arose from my bed at any hour of the night or morning and walked two miles to the observatory to make some observation included in the programme.

The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere.

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.

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.

Therefore I would not have it unknown to Your Holiness, the the only thing which induced me to look for another way of reckoning the movements of the heavenly bodies was that I knew that mathematicians by no means agree in their investigation thereof.

I have always loved astronomy, and being an astronomer once lurked in the back of my mind. But I was never good at algebra. In fact, I flunked it twice in high school.

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

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.

I have worn myself thin trying to find out about this comet, and I know very little now in the matter.

Scarce any problem will appear more hard and difficult, than that of determining the distance of the Sun from the Earth very near the truth: but even this... will without much labour be effected.

I have just gone over my comet computations again, and it is humiliating to perceive how very little more I know than I did seven years ago when I first did this kind of work.

In order to know the true situation of a Planet at any particular time, the small set of balls are to be put each on its respective axis; then the winch to be turned round until each index points to the given time.

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.

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.

People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens of the firmament, the sun and the moon. This fool wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth

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.

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.

After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain.

'Animal Kingdom' is a significant comet, and it's cast a tail. It's very hard to see anything post that happening without that.

During the winter my attention was attracted to the changes in the stars and planets in the sky.

We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.

One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.

I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon.