Celestial Display Quotes

FALLING STARS: Do you remember still the falling stars that like swift horses through the heavens raced and suddenly leaped across the hurdles of our wishes -- do you recall? And we did make so many! For there were countless numbers of stars: each time we looked above we were astounded by the swiftness of their daring play, while in our hearts we felt safe and secure watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate, knowing somehow we had survived their fall.

I remarked constantly, just at sunset, in these latitudes, that the eastern horizon was brilliantly illuminated with a kind of mock sunset. This in a short time disappeared, to be soon succeeded by another similar in character, but more faint.

The first stars tremble as if shimmering in green water. Hours must pass before their glimmer hardens into the frozen glitter of diamonds. I shall have a long wait before I witness the soundless frolic of the shooting stars. In the profound darkness of certain nights I have seen the sky streaked with so many trailing sparks that it seemed to me a great gale must be blowing through the outer heavens.

Outside, in the newly fallen darkness, the world had been transformed. The sky had become a glistening tapestry of stars.

The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.

..because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age,—lasting as space and time,—embosomed in time and space.

I've stood outside my house in Montana looking at the northern lights... crackling against the night sky. To me, that's magic.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

Earth-treading stars that make dark heaven light

Overhead, the stars were wheeling and infinite, a complicated mobile made by giants.

The wide stare stared itself out for one while; the Sun went down in a red, green, golden glory; the stars came out in the heavens, and the fire-flies mimicked them in the lower air, as men may feebly imitate the goodness of a better order of beings; the long dusty roads and the interminable plains were in repose-and so deep a hush was on the sea, that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall give up its dead.

At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.

Rays were blazing through the atmosphere of the earth, the horizon became bright orange, gradually passing into all the colors of the rainbow: from light blue to dark blue, to violet and then to black. What an indescribable gamut of colors! Just like the paintings of the artist Nicholas Roerich.

So if big enough droplets fell far enough fast enough, someone floating right near the metallic hydrogen layer inside Jupiter maybe, just maybe, could have looked up into its cream and orange sky and seen the most spectacular show ever--fireworks lighting up the Jovian night with a trillion streaks of brilliant crimson, what scientists call neon rain.

I designed a system to project video on the moon for all of humanity to see. I did this sort of as therapy as I was doing my Ph.D. in device physics.