Observational Astronomy Quotes

Hubble is unique. Nothing else can do what it can do. Once it's gone, we're going to be paralyzed.

Astronomers ought to be able to ask fundamental questions without accelerators.

Until the 1990s, there were few reliable observations about movement at the scale of the entire universe, which is the only scale dark energy effects. So dark energy could not be seen until we could measure things very, very far away.

The Keck telescope, which is the largest in the world, had opened just before I began my faculty position at UCLA.

Astronomy is written for astronomers

As an astrophysicist, my research work involves mapping dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for about a quarter of our universe.

The study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective were no practical results to follow.

'First Light' is nonfiction, a true story about astronomers who are looking for light coming from the edge of the universe. It tells how science is really done - and science is a lot weirder and more human than most people realize.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

In the course of writing 'First Light,' I climbed all over and through the Hale Telescope, where I found rooms, stairways, tunnels, and abandoned machines leaking oil. My notebooks show tooth-marks where I gripped them with my teeth while climbing around inside the telescope, and the notebooks are stained with Flying Horse telescope oil.

I expect New Horizons will see more that Hubble cannot see.

Astronomy is a cold, desert science, with all its pompous figures,-depends a little too much on the glass-grinder, too little on the mind. 'T is of no use to show us more planets and systems. We know already what matter is, and more or less of it does not signify.

I have tried to improve telescopes and practiced continually to see with them. These instruments have play'd me so many tricks that I have at last found them out in many of their humours.