Stellar Observation Quotes

All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.

When I look up into the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is I really see there, I am constrained to say, ´there is no god´.

I believe I can even yet remember when I saw the stars for the first time.

What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.

It was the way she felt when she looked at the stars.

When we gaze at a star in the Milky Way which is 50,000 light-years away from our sun, we are looking back 50,000 years in time." "The idea is much too big for my little head." "The only way we can look out into space, then, is to look back in time. We can never know what the universe is like now. We only know what it was like then. When we look up at a star that is thousands of light-years away, we are really traveling thousands of years back in the history of space.

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.

Because Hubble's been up so many years now, it's actually given us a window to things like... how planets' atmospheres actually change, evolve... over time.

We are now able to put our minds in other places in the universe with the use of telescopes. That is very exciting.

The number of the fixed stars which observers have been able to see without artificial powers of sight up to this day can be counted. It is therefore decidedly a great feat to add to their number, and to set distinctly before the eyes other stars in myriads, which have never been seen before, and which surpass the old, previously known stars in number more than ten times.

Stars appear as pin-points of light. They don't twinkle there as they do when we see them from earth because the atmospheric blanket is not there.

There must be other races out there, watching our tiny yellow sun glimmering in their unknown field of the sky. Do they desire us as we desire them?

But what exceeds all wonders, I have discovered four new planets and observed their proper and particular motions, different among themselves and from the motions of all the other stars; and these new planets move about another very large star [Jupiter] like Venus and Mercury, and perchance the other known planets, move about the Sun. As soon as this tract, which I shall send to all the philosophers and mathematicians as an announcement, is finished, I shall send a copy to the Most Serene Grand Duke, together with an excellent spyglass, so that he can verify all these truths.

Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again.

Hubble uniquely has been able to look in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a nearby star and figure out what's in that atmosphere.

Shuddering under the autumn stars, each year, the head sinks lower and lower.

He stared up at the stars, and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.