Quotes about Astronomy

Kepler's second law: A planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times. It takes as long to travel from B to A as from F to E as from D to C; and the shaded areas BSA, FSE and DSC are all equal.

The fifth regular solid must then, they thought, correspond to some fifth element that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies.

As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.

The total number of such worlds are, as I said, something of the order of a trillion, or 10^12, a one followed by twelve zeros, of which Earth represents just one, all in the family of the Sun. And our star, of course, is one of a vast multitude.

The development of the telescope, together with increased knowledge of things, brought men to see that the earth is not what man had once thought it to be.

We have a conception that God is a haphazard God with no set of rules of life and salvation. Ask the astronomer if God is a haphazard God. He will tell you that every star moves with precision in its celestial path.

The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.

The scientific content of Genesis 1-11 holds special significance for me because it revolutionized my thinking and, thus, changed my life's direction. Until I reached my late teens, my singular passion was science, astronomy in particular. My life's purpose was to learn more about the universe; nothing beyond that really interested me.

But the Solar System!" I protested. "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.

The starry copeOf heaven.

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

in 1992 came the first confirmed observation of a planet orbiting a star other than our sun.