Clyde Tombaugh Quotes

I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.

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.

If you start out with a little telescope observing the stars and you keep at it over the years, as I have, it's kind of a dream to one day have an observatory where you can always go and use the telescope conveniently.

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 sketch while I'm on set, and it's a way for me to record all of the locations I've been to. I don't keep a diary but a sketchbook.

For me, travelling and drawing the world, experiencing as much as possible first hand, has been very important. Making notes, drawing and writing on the move, became second nature.

I saw, in looking over Cooper, elements of a comet of 1825 which resemble what I get out for this, from my own observations, but I cannot rely upon my own.

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 rest of my work, besides sketching and keeping a diary, which was the most troublesome of all, consisted in making geological and zoological collections.

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 am just learning to notice the different colors of the stars, and already begin to have a new enjoyment.

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

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

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.

On one hand, to be able to go from one direction in the sky to study such an object to another direction to study another object, and on the other hand to be able to maintain accurately the position in space.

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

On the comparatively small territorial surface of Europe there are existing upward of 130 light-houses of the skies while in the American hemisphere there is not one.

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

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.

Surely it is a great thing to increase the numerous host of fixed stars previously visible to the unaided vision, adding countless more which have never before been seen, exposing these plainly to the eye in numbers ten times exceeding the old and familiar stars.

Every observation that we make, every mission that we send to various places in the solar system is just taking us one step further to finding that truly habitable environment, a water-rich environment.

It has always irked me as improper that there are still so many people for whom the sky is no more than a mass of random points of light. I do not see why we should recognize a house, a tree, or a flower here below and not, for example, the red Arcturus up there in the heavens as it hangs from its constellation Bootes, like a basket hanging from a balloon.

Your mission is to document and observe the world around you as if you’ve never seen it before. Take notes. Collect things you find on your travels. Document your findings. Notice patterns. Copy. Trace. Focus on one thing at a time. Record what you are drawn to.

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