Astronomy

"Can I get two maybe even three of these, Comin' from a space to teach you of the Pleiades."

"Though all I knew of the rote universe were those Pleiades, loosed in December, I promised you I'd set them to verse, so I'd always remember"

"The Pleiades are an extraordinarily beautiful and brilliant star cluster in the constellation of Taurus. I have a large picture of them hanging in my recording studio, and sometimes when I look at this picture, I am inspired to compose a certain kind of music, which is very different from the music I usually compose, and very different from anything I have ever heard before. This album is a collection of those pieces.;"

"Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?"

"Our shells clacked on the plates. My tongue was a filling estuary, My palate hung with starlight: As I tasted the salty Pleiades Orion dipped his foot into the water."

"Pleiades callin' her home Seven Sisters, she hears her distant Sisters."

"It behoveth you to seek agreement and to be united; it behoveth you to be in close communion one with the other, at one both in body and soul, till ye match the Pleiades or a string of lustrous pearls."

"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?"

"Which maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades, and the chambers of the south."

"Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion."

"Something there is more immortal even than the stars, (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,) Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter Longer than sun or any revolving satellite, Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades."

"The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious, They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition, Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge, They are immortal…"

"Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid."

"Last night I saw the Pleiades again, Faint as a drift of steam From some tall chimney-stack;"

"TELESCOPE, n. A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice."

"The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope, then he sees worlds beyond; but, if he looks at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that."

"The widespread notion that the scientific method is unbiased and objective, that scientists are and always have been lacking in human emotion in the course of their work, is a farce. Today’s science endeavor is as value-laden as most things in life."

"The glaring hardware faults on Hubble derive from a case of engineering myopia, a clear and steady failure to heed the bigger picture. For example: telescope optics machined improperly and tested inadequately by overconfident engineers, with no meaningful technical or scientific input from outside the secretive contractor . . . [and] the incorporation into Hubble of used goods, such as decades-old gyroscopes [gyros that had been tested for some 70,000 hours before use in the telescope—‘tested to death,’ as one engineer stated] and memory boards meant for antique space vehicles."

"The four million lines of computer code needed to command and control it daily—one of the largest codes in the civilian world—is testimony to Hubble’s high degree of complexity."

"The largest, most complex, and most powerful observatory ever deployed in space."

"[The Hubble Space Telescope is] probably the most sophisticated scientific satellite ever built."

"Few astronomers could have anticipated that this event—the sudden birth of the Universe—would become a proven scientific fact, but observations of the heavens through telescopes have forced them to that conclusion."

"The eye appears to have been designed; no designer of telescopes could have done better."

"Hubble is fixed beyond our wildest expectations."

"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."

"About ten months ago [1609] a report reached my ears that a certain Fleming [Hans Lippershey] had constructed a spyglass, by means of which visible objects, though very distant from the eye of the observer, were distinctly seen as if nearby... Of this truly remarkable effect several experiences were related, to which some persons gave credence while others denied them. A few days later the report was confirmed to me in a letter from a noble Frenchman at Paris, Jacques Badovere, which caused me to apply myself wholeheartedly to enquire into the means by which I might arrive at the invention of a similar instrument. This I did shortly afterwards, my basis being the theory of refraction. First I prepared a tube of lead, at the ends of which I fitted two glass lenses, both plane on one side while on the other side one was spherically convex and the other concave."

"Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas, we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction."

"When the equinox entered Pisces, the Savior of the World "appeared as the Fisher of Men.""

"The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Æquinox? Every hour adds unto that current arithmetick, which scarce stands one moment."

"I've always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That's the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child's purity is corrupted by society, that's the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he's being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the twenty-fifth of December."

"At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite. I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and double stretch of water."

"In the decades that followed, a number of observations indicated that the Galaxy could not have formed in such a rapid collapse. The ELS model, as originally proposed,could not be right. One notable alternative was suggested by the American astronomers Leonard Searle and Robert Zinn in 1978… Instead of a single-cloud collapse, Searle and Zinn proposed that the halo of the Milky Way formed by the aggregation of many cloud fragments, each of which may have already formed stars and globular clusters"

"As, pricked out with less and greater lights, between the poles of the universe, the Milky Way so gleameth white as to set very sages questioning."

"For the Milky Way, we find that the orbital speed increases and then remains roughly constant. This implies that we are still within the body of the Milky Way, even at the largest distances from the center of the Milky Way. We have not yet located the edge of the Milky Way; the Milky Way extends much further than the edge of the disk of stars (the visible disk)! The mass contained in the Milky Way (in the visible disk) is 2x1011 M(Sun). The mass contained in the Milky Way galaxy (out to as far as we can see HI gas) is 6x1011 M(Sun)."

"...the mass where we can see stars is only 1/3 of the mass of the entire Galaxy. This suggests that a lot of mass in the Milky Way is in some form which does not radiate large amounts of light (Dark Matter)."

"Sjelfva vintergatan är idel verldar, hvilkas sken som knappast räcker til oss."

"Fascinated by its symmetry the geometer may at times have been too exclusively engrossed with his science, forgetful of its applications; he may have exalted it into his idol and worshipped it; he may have degraded it into the toy– when he should have been hard at work with it, using it mankind and the glory of his creator....But ascend with me above the dust, above the cloud, to the realms of the higher geometry, where the heavens are never clouded, where there is no impure vapour and no delusive or imperfect observation, where the new truths are already arisen, while they are yet dimly dawning on the world below, where the earth is a little planet; where the sun has dwindled to a star; where all the stars are lost in the Milky Way to which they belong ; where the Milky Way is seen floating through space, like any other nebula; where the whole great girdle of the nebulae has diminished to an atom and has become as readily and completely submissive to the pen of geometer, and the slave of his formula, as the single drop, which falls from the clouds instinct with all forces of the material world. Try with me the precision of measure with which the universe has been meted out; observe how exactly all the parts are fitted to the whole and to each other, and then declare who was present in the council-chamber when the Lord laid the foundations of the earth."

"It may seem rash indeed to draw conclusions valid for the whole universe from what we can see from the small corner to which we are confined. Who knows that the whole visible universe is not like a drop of water at the surface of the earth? Inhabitants of that drop of water, as small relative to it as we are relative to the Milky Way, could not possibly imagine that beside the drop of water there might be a piece of iron or a living tissue, in which the properties of matter are entirely different."

"Astronomers have mapped the cosmic watershed in which our Milky Way Galaxy is a droplet. The massive structure, which the research team dubs the Laniakea Supercluster, extends more than 500 million light-years and contains 100,000 large galaxies. The work, published in the September 4th Nature, is the first to trace our local supercluster on such a large scale. It also provides a physical way to define what a supercluster actually is."

"We cast the message to the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future. When our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring."

"This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization. We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: "This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe”."

"Most known extrasolar planets (exoplanets) have been discovered using the radial velocity, or transit methods. Both are biased towards planets that are relatively close to their parent stars, and studies find that around 17–30% of solar-like stars host a planet. Gravitational microlensing, on the other hand, probes planets that are further away from their stars. Recently, a population of planets that are unbound or very far from their stars was discovered by microlensing. These planets are at least as numerous as the stars in the Milky Way."

"It was first surmised by the ancient philosopher, Democritus, that the faintly white zone which spans the sky under the name of the Milky Way, might be only a dense collection of stars too remote to be distinguished. This conjecture has been verified by the instruments of modern astronomers, and some speculation of a remarkable kind have been formed in connection with it."

"I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long."

"Galileo claimed to have seen mountains on the Moon, to have proved the Milky Way was made up of tiny stars, and to have seen four small bodies orbiting Jupiter. These last, with an eye to getting a position in Florence, he quickly named 'the Medicean stars'."

"What was observed by us in the third place is the nature or matter of the Milky Way itself, which, with the aid of the spyglass, may be observed so well that all the disputes that for so many generations have vexed philosophers are destroyed by visible certainty, and we are liberated from wordy arguments."

"Space is not space between the earth and the sun to one who looks down from the windows of the Milky Way."

"Scientists previously placed the Milky Way in the Virgo Supercluster, but under Tully and colleagues' definition, this region becomes just an appendage of the much larger Laniakea, which is 160 million parsecs (520 million light years) across and contains the mass of 100 million billion Suns."

"What of the scientists who assumed that continents were stable, that the hereditary material was protein, or that all other galaxies lay within the Milky Way? These false and abandoned efforts were pursued with passion by brilliant and honoura le scientists."

"Exalted Manna, gladness of the best, Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed, The milky way, the bird of Paradise, Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood, The land of spices something understood."