#astronomy

Pluto is currently designated a 'plutoid', and if you think that sounds ok, try adding 'oid' to your name. Her? She's a Susanoid. Hi, I'm a Davoid. It's demoralising. ↗

— Ruth Spencer

#design

Let's grant that the stars are scattered through space, hither and yon. But how hither, and how yon? To the unaided eye the brightest stars are more than a hundred times brighter than the dimmest. So the dim ones are obviously a hundred times farther away from Earth, aren't they? Nope. That simple argument boldly assumes that all stars are intrinsically equally luminous, automatically making the near ones brighter than the far ones. Stars, however, come in a staggering range of luminosities, spanning ten orders of magnitude ten powers of ten. So the brightest stars are not necessarily the ones closest to Earth. In fact, most of the stars you see in the night sky are of the highly luminous variety, and they lie extraordinarily far away. If most of the stars we see are highly luminous, then surely those stars are common throughout the galaxy. Nope again. High-luminosity stars are the rarest. In any given volume of space, they're outnumbered by the low-luminosity stars a thousand to one. It's the prodigious energy output of high-luminosity stars that enables you to see them across such large volumes of space. ↗

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

#physics #death

Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#experience #god #sunlight #woods #experience

Love is only one fine star away. ↗

— Stevie Nicks

#hope #love #stars #love

Cuisine is a universal and mixed-race love marriage, in which man sublimates a place and a culture. ↗

— Marc Veyrat

#love

Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#exploration #night-sky #nocturnal #skywatcher #space

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth. ↗

— Voltaire

#astronomy #daughter #daughters #dominated #earth

Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to. ↗

— Octavia Butler

#about #anthropology #astronomy #fun #geology

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. ↗

— Ernst Mach

#astronomy #cast #correction #doubt #easily

You will certainly not doubt the necessity of studying astronomy and physics, if you are desirous of comprehending the relation between the world and Providence as it is in reality, and not according to imagination. ↗

— Maimonides

#astronomy #between #certainly #comprehending #desirous