Telescope Quotations

Astronomers sometimes observe that a star of medium magnitude increases suddenly in size; a star invisible to the naked eye may become very brilliant and visible without any telescope - the appearance of a Nova.

I remember being fascinated by ants and wasps and other bugs when I was a kid. I'd set out a Coke can and stand back 20 feet and use my telescope to watch wasps land on it.

The first sort of big present I remember getting from Santa Claus was quite a small telescope that I remember going into our backyard with my parents and figuring out how to assemble, and staring at the night sky, just for hours, with both of my parents.

Epistemology has always been affected by technologies like the telescope and the microscope, things that have created a radical shift in how we sense physical reality.

The bottom line is that finding orphan planets - small, faint, and located who-knows-where - is not for the faint of heart. The task is comparable to observing a match flame at the distance of Pluto. The WISE satellite, a hi-tech, space-based infrared telescope especially suited for such work, has found only a few.

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.

The strongest signals leaking off our planet are radar transmissions, not television or radio. The most powerful radars, such as the one mounted on the Arecibo telescope (used to study the ionosphere and map asteroids) could be detected with a similarly sized antenna at a distance of nearly 1,000 light-years.

I got interested in astronomy at the age of 8 because I was looking at an atlas of the planets in my parents' apartment in Arlington, where I grew up. I got a telescope at age 10, which is pretty normal, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I had already seen a lot of cheesy sci-fi films.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.

The mission of NASA's Kepler telescope is to lift the scales from our eyes and reveal to us just how typical our home world is. Kepler operates by measuring the dimming of stars as planets pass ('transit') in front of them. It has found thousands of previously unknown worlds.

If I had a time machine, I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens.

This plucky NASA telescope is able to find planets en masse. If you compare planet hunting to prospecting for gold, then Kepler is equivalent to trading in your trusty pan for a diesel-powered sluice box.

With the Hubble telescope and all the other things that are out there, I believe something would have come through. Today, I really believe we are unique.

With this method, we let the gravity of a dim, intervening star act as a giant natural telescope for us, magnifying a more distant star, which then temporarily looks brighter.

We have no idea if there really are aliens. The next question would be, If there are aliens, can we detect it? The answer is yes. With this telescope we now have a much better chance.

We can never prove that we're alone in the universe. But the Allen Telescope Array could prove that we're not.

When I looked through that first telescope my paradigm shifted up course. I realized it was a really big universe and I wanted to know all about it.

Like a celestial chaperon, the placebo leads us through the uncharted passageways of mind and gives us a greater sense of infinity than if we were to spend all our days with our eyes hypnotically glued to the giant telescope at Mt. Palomar. What we see ultimately is that the placebo isn't really necessary and that the mind can carry out its difficult and wondrous missions unprompted by little pills. The placebo is only a tangible object made essential in an age that feels uncomfortable with intangibles, an age that prefers to think that every inner effect must have an outer cause. Since it has size and shape and can be hand-held, the placebo satisfies the contemporary craving for visible mechanisms and visible answers . The placebo, then, is an emissary between the will to live and the body.

LBT pushes the state of the art in telescope performance, and it is a tremendous honor to be named the director. I'm excited by the challenge of completing the ambitious vision and satisfying the partners' scientific aspirations for this powerful, path-finding telescope.

My life-long interest in astronomy started then and I still regularly use a telescope for astronomical observations, although very much as an amateur.

I can actually build my equipment at the back end of the telescope such that it takes the data from all of the separate antennas and adds the signal together with different time delays and different phase shifts - it's as if I were picking out up to eight individual pixels in this large field of view.

I am confident that Americans of all walks of life will come to the defense of the Hubble and cause the Congress to restore the repair of the telescope to the NASA budget.

Because we have a dome now, instead of a flat roof, the telescope sits a lot higher on its mount. They built a platform that surrounds the base so that it is the perfect height for students to look into it.

I majored in physics at IU. But I took a whole lot of astronomy classes. I thought it would be great to have a solar telescope ... be able to see things during the day with the students.

I feel privileged and honored to have flown. It's been a tremendous ride, looking back on the legacy and accomplishments, like the Hubble telescope and the launching of the International Space Station in 1998.

If the skies are clear and the telescope is working right, you can see features on the surface of Mars,

We then resorted to watching them through a telescope and marked the places where they landed to pick up sample droppings for viral tests,

When he came to me wanting to do something in astronomy, I got excited. Astronomy is my first love in science. But he wanted to buy a big telescope which we couldn't afford.

Mars coming this close is an excellent opportunity for amateur astronomers to see Mars, ... With a good amateur telescope right now, you can easily see the ice cap on the Martian pole.

When discussing the rise and fall of empires, it is well to mark closely their rate of growth, avoiding the temptation to telescope time and discover too early signs of greatness in a state which we know will one day be great, or to predict too early the collapse of an empire which we know will one day cease to be. The life-span of empires cannot be plotted by events, only by careful diagnosis and ausculation--and as in medicine there is always room for error.

We've designed the telescope at a fraction of the normal cost without losing any resolution,

The only thing that's missing is (Fujimori's son) Kenji with his telescope to complete the circle, ... Never have we seen a president like this one playing cowboy or cop.

The opening of this telescope represents one of those rare moments in a field of scientific endeavor when a great leap forward is enabled.

We have established that the radio telescope we used, the Very Long Baseline Array, can measure distances with unprecedented accuracy--nearly a factor of 100 times better than previously accomplished.

At the age of eight, I bought my first telescope and would spend hours gazing at the moon and stars. I remember thinking what it must have been like when man first realized that we were only a very small part of the overall picture.

First, we spent hundreds of hours since January 2003 trying to characterize how the telescope responds to radio waves.

These results were incredibly exciting to me for a number of reasons. There's the scientific result of a helical field structure. Then, there's the successful measurement: This type of observation is very difficult, and it took dozens of hours on the telescope just to understand how this enormous dish responds to the polarized radio waves that are the signature of a magnetic field.

The telescope was designed to be very sensitive and have a very clean response to signals from the sky.

Scientists are keenly aware that the telescope is up there not doing anything. There's an enormous desire to get the telescope working. It's like a car -- you don't want to leave a car sitting in the garage not running. That's not good for it.

President Nixon cancelled in 1973 the Hubble Telescope while it was still in the development phase. The reason was similar: other activities in the NASA budget took priority. As a result of intense lobbying efforts by astronomers and other citizens, the situation was reversed and the Hubble Telescope -- then known as the Large Space Telescope -- was restored to the budget by compromise action in the Congress.

This is due to the fact that the telescope at La Palma has a much bigger mirror. It is far too expensive to bring such large mirrors out into space.

It took hundreds of hours of telescope time before we were confident that we could do reliable science.

There was a man so very tall,That when you spoke you had to ballThrough both your hands, put like a cup,His head was such a long way up...He grew and grew - you could not seeWithout a telescope his knee;He grew till he was over-grown,And seen by oversight alone!

There was a man so very tall, That when you spoke you had to ball Through both your hands, put like a cup, His head was such a long way up... He grew and grew - you could not see Without a telescope his knee; He grew till he was over-grown, And seen by oversight alone!

In all my years I've never had a team that's had this much talent in five players. But they seem to see a game out of a telescope instead of binoculars. They don't see the whole floor. They're penetrating when they should be passing. They're passing it when they should be penetrating. They're forgetting the role of every player, and that's to communicate with one another.

If the universe was finite, and had a size of about 4 billion to 5 billion light-years, then light would be able to wrap around the universe, and with a big enough telescope we could view the Earth just after it solidified and when the first life formed. Unfortunately, our results rule out this tantalizing possibility.

If you've ever looked through a telescope on the ground, all this shaking and shimmering going on (is) because you're using high-magnification track.

In the course of writing 'First Light,' I climbed all over and through the Hale Telescope, where I found rooms, stairways, tunnels, and abandoned machines leaking oil. My notebooks show tooth-marks where I gripped them with my teeth while climbing around inside the telescope, and the notebooks are stained with Flying Horse telescope oil.

In other words, ... people don't have to only come out here on Oct. 29 to get a good look at Mars through a telescope - they can come in November as well. On Oct. 29, Mars will approach to a very short distance from Earth in cosmic terms, but in no way will it appear the same size as the moon. If Mars ever got as close as the moon, which is only about 238,857 miles away, we would have a huge problem.

In a large telescope the motion would be perceptible against any stars in the field more or less in real time, sort of like watching the second hand on a clock, ... not quite that fast, but noticeable.

I appreciate the thought that these higher buildings will create a better view of the corridor, but the word is corridor. We'll be looking through a telescope to the river rather than a panorama.

However, to actually know what your seeing, a small telescope would be useful.

The Hubble Space Telescope can discriminate very subtle color differences on the surface.

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?