Astronomical Measurement Quotes

We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe, That's a good estimate with well-defined error bars, Scientists say it's true, but acknowledge that it may be refined, And with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you.

The Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations have perished; Hammurabi, Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar are empty names; yet Babylonian mathematics is still interesting, and the Babylonian scale of 60 is still used in Astronomy.

We look at distant exploding stars called supernovae, and we've developed techniques to measure how far away they are and how fast they're moving away from us.

For example, some stars put out large amounts of energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, so that this can produce a different relative magnitude rating than using light energy from the middle of the spectrum.

Whenever a total eclipse of the sun was visible in an accessible region parties were sent out to observe it.

All that was required to measure the planet was a man with a stick and a brain. In other words, couple an intellect with some experimental apparatus and almost anything seems achievable.

No matter how you measure it, whether you measure the amount of mass or you measure the number of bodies, most of our solar system exists out beyond the orbits of the asteroids. So we could not have claimed to know our own solar system until Voyager had toured the giant planets.

The waves are subtle, altering spacetime and the distance between objects as far apart as the Earth and the Moon by much less than the width of an atom. As such, gravitational radiation has not been directly detected yet. We hope to change that soon.

The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth's orbit as a base to fix the parallax of any other star

Geological age plays the same part in our views of the duration of the universe as the Earth's orbital radius does in our views of the immensity of space.

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.

The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.

Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled for leap-second dates. But society as a whole neither needs that obsessive time measurement nor is well served by it.

Ten decimal places of π are sufficient to give the circumference of the earth to a fraction of an inch, and thirty decimal places would give the circumference of the visible universe to a quantity imperceptible to the most powerful microscope.

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.

My amateur interest in astronomy brought out the term 'magnitude', which is used for the brightness of a star.