Observatory Quotes & Sayings

7.3-magnitude earthquake hits near Papua New Guinea A powerful earthquake struck off the South Pacific nation of Papua New Guinea on Friday, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The U.S. Geological Survey said the magnitude-7.3 earthquake was located 61 kilometres (38 miles) southwest of the town of Panguna on Bougainville Island. It struck at a depth of 50 kilometres (31 miles). The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was no threat of a destructive widespread tsunami. But the agency said quakes of this size can sometimes generate waves that can be destructive to coasts within a few hundred kilometres (miles) of the epicenter. A staffer at the Geophysical Observatory in the capital, Port Moresby, said no reports of damage or unusual wave activity along — Anonymous

Ten years after the first commercial train service began operating between Liverpool and Manchester, in 1830, the first train timetable was issued. The trains were much faster than the old carriages, so the quirky differences in local hours became a severe nuisance. In 1847, British train companies put their heads together and agreed that henceforth all train timetables would be calibrated to Greenwich Observatory time, rather than the local times of Liverpool, Manchester or Glasgow. More and more institutions followed the lead of the train companies. Finally, in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset — Yuval Noah Harari

The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The astronomer is, in some measure, independent of his fellow astronomer; he can wait in his observatory till the star he wishes to observe comes to his meridian; but the meteorologist has his observations bounded by a very limited horizon, and can do little without the aid of numerous observers furnishing him contemporaneous observations over a wide-extended area. — James Pollard Espy

OBSERVATORY, n. A place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of their predecessors. — Ambrose Bierce

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once. — Henry David Thoreau

In October, 1865, occurred what was, in my eyes, the greatest event in the history of the observatory. The new transit circle arrived from Berlin in its boxes. — Simon Newcomb

On a clear night the naked eye can see about 4,500 stars, so the astronomers say. The telescope of even a small observatory makes nearly 2,000,000 stars visible, and a modern reflecting telescope brings the light from thousands of millions more to the viewer - specks of light in the Milky Way. But in the colossal dimensions of the cosmos our stellar system is only a tiny part of an incomparably larger stellar system - of a cluster of Milky Ways, one might say, containing some twenty galaxies within a radius of 1,500,000 light-years (1 light-year=the distance traveled by light in a year, i.e., 186,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 miles). And even this vast number of stars is small in comparison with the many thousands of spiral nebulae disclosed by the electronic telescope. Disclosed to the present day, I should emphasize, for research of this kind is only just beginning. — Erich Von Daniken

Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime ... What is so good in a college as an observatory? The sublime attaches to the door and to the first stair you ascent, that this is the road to the stars. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As I was leaving graduate school in 1974, I was recruited to join a fledgling SETI project at the Hat Creek Observatory in California, mainly because I knew how to program an ancient PDP8/S computer that had been donated to the project. — Jill Tarter

To Solitude
O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,
Nature's observatory - whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
'Mongst boughs pavillion'd, where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin'd,
Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. — John Keats

Just as an astronomer, alone in an observatory, watches night after night through a telescope the myriads of stars, their mysterious movements, their changeful medley, their extinction and their flaming-up anew, so did Jacob Mendel, seated at his table in the Cafe Gluck, look through his spectacles into the universe of books, a universe that lies above the world of our everyday life, and, like the stellar universe, is full of changing cycles. — Stefan Zweig

Picture yourself during the early 1920's inside the dome of the Mount Wilson Observatory ... Humason is showing Shapley stars he had found in the Andromeda Nebula that appeared and disappeared on photographs of that object. The famous astronomer very patiently explains that these objects could not be stars because the Nebula was a nearby gaseous cloud within our own Milky Way system. Shapley takes his handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the identifying marks off the back of the photographic plate. — Halton Arp

Why not? Of the four possible sites, this has the best electromagnetic environment." "What about the human environment? Comrades, don't just focus on the technical side. Look at how poor this place is. The poorer a village, the craftier the people. Do you understand? If the observatory were located here, there would be trouble between the scientists and the locals. I can imagine the peasants thinking of the astronomy complex as a juicy piece of meat that they can take bites from." This site was indeed not approved, and the reason was just what the task force leader had said. * — Liu Cixin

The true scientific mind is not to be tied down by its own conditions of time and space. It builds itself an observatory erected upon the border line of present, which separates the infinite past from the infinite future. From this sure post it makes its sallies even to the beginning and to the end of all things. As — Arthur Conan Doyle

After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain. — Timothy Ferriss

As the story goes, Albert Einstein's wife Elsa remarked, upon hearing that a telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory was needed to determine the shape of space-time: Oh, my husband does this on the back of an old envelope. — Edward Frenkel

Every wise man lives in an observatory. — Augustus William Hare

His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. 'Tragedy excites the soul,' he later told one of his secretaries, 'lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.'24 — Andrew Roberts

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope. — Henry Ward Beecher

In 1994, NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory detected something as unexpected as the Velas' discoveries: frequent flashes of gamma rays right near Earth's surface. They were sensibly dubbed "terrestrial gamma-ray flashes." Nuclear holocaust? No, as is evident from the fact that you're reading this sentence. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Not far from the meeting's venue, at one of the famed Observatory Club tea meetings, Fred once started a talk by saying, 'Oh, Ooh, basically a star is a pretty simple thing.' And from the back of the room was heard the voice of R. O. Redman, saying, 'Well, Fred, you'd look pretty simple too, from ten parsecs! — Fred Hoyle

Apropos of the observatory, — Isabel Allende

Sketches of mad skies spilling stars caught in spiraling gyres, diagrams for constructing sextants tall as a man and armillary spheres to mimic the motion of the cosmos. He decides that he must have all of it, that he will cram the little observatory with maps and charts, clocks and compasses, and instruments for bringing the sky nearer. — John Pipkin

In the time before Gnan (time before 1958 when Dada Bhagwan got manifested) there was obstinacy within me. 'I' discovered that obstinacy does not let the light of Gnan (Eternal Knowledge) to come through. Then I saw all that obstinacy, and it was destroyed. Thereafter the Gnan (Eternal Knowledge) manifested. One has to observe one's own self that where lies the obstinacies. The Self is an observatory itself. — Dada Bhagwan

By analyzing data from Greenwich Observatory in the period 1836-1953, John A. Eddy [Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory in Boulder] and Aram A. Boornazian [mathematician with S. Ross and Co. in Boston] have found evidence that the sun has been contracting about 0.1% per century during that time, corresponding to a shrinkage rate of about 5 feet per hour. And digging deep into historical records, Eddy has found 400-year-old eclipse observations that are consistent with such a shrinkage. — Jonathan Sarfati

A modern example of this stunning knowledge of nature that Einstein has gifted us, comes from 2016, when gravitational waves were discovered by a specially designed observatory tuned for just this purpose. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

There's the Hollywood sign; there's Griffith Observatory; there's the great, amazing Los Angeles Basin. It's 465 square miles of insanity and the best food on the planet. — Robert Crais

Working on the summit of Mauna Kea was comparable to working on the hospital pulmonary ward with sick people sucking on oxygen cylinders. — Steven Magee

If you start out with a little telescope observing the stars and you keep at it over the years, as I have, it's kind of a dream to one day have an observatory where you can always go and use the telescope conveniently. — Timothy Ferriss

Well, yes," she said, looking equal parts amused and bewildered. "But it's the truth! I love my work, and that counts for something, doesn't it?" Those government bureaucrats would trample Sophie to pieces if she couldn't stand up for herself. He walked around the counter until he was standing directly opposite her. "Come on, Sophie! Stand up straight and look me in the eye. Tell me that you are the master and commander of that climate observatory. That there is no one in the state of New York who can operate that office with more efficiency than you. Make me believe it!" "Shhh . . . your grandfather is taking a nap," she said, but she was giggling and at least seemed to be considering his point. It was going to be a challenge to prop her up enough so she could land a position at one of these newfangled observatories, but a fun one. "Let's hear it. Dazzle me with your rhetorical brilliance. — Elizabeth Camden

Except they kept asking me questions like 'What is your biggest source of conflict about the Pope?' Or 'Has the Pope ever tried to suppress your scientific work?' Completely out of left field!
"They didn't want to hear me tell them how much Pope Benedict supported the Vatican Observatory and its scientific work. So, finally, frustrated that they weren't getting the story they wanted out of me, one of them asked, 'Would you baptize an extraterrestrial?'
"What did you answer?"
"Only if she asks!"
"I love it! How did they react?"
"They all got a good laugh, which is what I intended. And then, the next day, they all ran my joke as if it were a straight story, as if I had made some sort of official Vatican pronouncement about aliens. — Guy Consolmagno

My interest in science was excited at age nine by an article on astronomy in National Geographic; the author was Donald Menzel of the Harvard Observatory. For the next few years, I regularly made star maps and snuck out at night to make observations from a locust tree in our back yard. — Dudley R. Herschbach

The Stage Office" on Mount Washington housed the first year-round weather observatory in the 1870s. It was used again when observers re-occupied the summit in 1933. Max Engelhart was serving snacks here when a storm overtook him in October 1926. — Nicholas S. Howe

Regularly, customers asked for a book on Greenwich, and there was none. After all, Elizabeth I was born there. The Observatory is known all over the world; the Royal Naval College is there. So I decided to do it. — Nigel Hamilton

Our parents met at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona at a high school summer science camp. "I'd come to see the heavens," our father always said. "But the stars were in her eyes," a line that used to please and embarrass me in equal measure. Young geeks in love. — Karen Joy Fowler

have to talk to Mr West. I'm sure he'll be able to help you.' 'We'll do that, Mrs Clegg,' replied Fitzjohn. 'Now, I don't want to keep you too much longer but Mr Van Goren arrived at the Observatory last evening in a taxi so I take it he didn't — Jill Paterson

In the library of the observatory in Ondrejov, above Prague, I once found a catalogue of stars that astounded me. It had hundreds of pages with tables of stars that had been observed and confirmed to exist. Towards the end there was a table of stars thought to have been observed but confirmed to not exist. But to my astonishment, at the back of the volume I found a list of stars which had never been observed and did not exist.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the universe is that we could create an infinite catalogue of things, worlds and beings that no one has seen and which do not exist. Each story in the realm of fiction is a small part of that catalogue. — Peter Nilson

The result was that, if it happened to clear off after a cloudy evening, I frequently arose from my bed at any hour of the night or morning and walked two miles to the observatory to make some observation included in the programme. — Simon Newcomb

A healthy person that uses medical oxygen to perform their job on a daily basis should expect to eventually become a sick person. — Steven Magee

The least we can say about the Great Pyramid of Giza is that it certainly was an observatory of the heavens. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

It's like escaping a hot, bright room
for the serenity of a city at night, covered in snow.
People eliminated. A carpet of silence
for taxis to whisper across. The world becoming
a pleasant dream of itself. The itch
of want smoldering to life on skin. Memory sends
a chill vanishing between vertebrae.
It's New Year's Eve. Hail the Calendar! As if
clocks will pause for a moment
before reloading their long rifles. Years are tiny
freckles on the face of a century.
Where is the constellation we gazed at each night
Through a bill rolled so tight
the first President lost his breath, as our eyeballs
literally unraveled? I am alone
in the rectangular borough in the observatory,
where even fire trucks can't rescue
the arsonist stretching his calves in my brain. — Jeffrey McDaniel

If anything, the genesis of colleges in the Islamic world seems to have been a way to organise those scholars who were opposed to philosophy and rationalism. Knowledge and science in ancient times were supported by individual patrons and when these patrons changed their priorities, or when they died, any institutions that they might have built often died with them. This is a major reason why no observatory lasted more than 30 years in any of the Islamic empires. — Ehsan Masood