Observatory Quotes

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope. (Henry Ward Beecher)
Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once. View quote
Henry David Thoreau
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. View quote
Simon Newcomb
You are invited to come to see the Earth turn, tomorrow, from three to five, at Meridian Hall of the Paris Observatory. View quote
Léon Foucault
[T]he instrumental conceptions derived from the use of a common globe are sufficient, in almost every case, for the understanding of the instruments in an Observatory... View quote
George Biddell Airy
I had long wished for some opportunity of endeavouring to explain... the principles on which the instruments of an Observatory are constructed, (omitting all details, so far as they are merely subsidiary,) and the principles on which the observations made with these instruments are treated... Such an opportunity appeared to present itself in the course of Lectures which I engaged to give to the Members of the Ipswich Museum and their friends. View quote
George Biddell Airy
In conversing with persons who are not officially attached to Observatories or in other ways professionally cognizant of the technicalities of practical Astronomy but who nevertheless display great interest... these persons appear to regard the determination of measures like those of the distance of the Sun and Moon as mysteries beyond ordinary comprehension... [and] when persons well acquainted with the general facts of Astronomy are introduced into an Observatory, they are for the most part utterly unable to understand anything which they see... The measure of the Moon's distance involves no principle more abstruse than the measure of the distance of a tree on the opposite bank of a river. The principles of construction of the best Astronomical instruments are as simple and as closely referred to matters of common school-education and familiar experience, as are those of the common globes, the steam engine, or the turning-lathe; the details are usually less complicated. View quote
George Biddell Airy
Ah! Silence is golden. When I was in my observatory at Belle-croix, I dared not move as the silence opened to me a course of discoveries. The families of the wood were then in action. It was the silence that permitted me, immovable as a tree trunk, to see the deer in their hiding-place and at their toilet, to observe the habits of the field rat, of the otter, of the salamander, those fantastic amphibious animals. He who lives in the silence becomes the center of a world; a little more and I could imagine myself the sun of a small creation, if my studies had not recalled to me that I had so much trouble to reproduce a poor tree or a cluster of rushes. View quote
Théodore Rousseau
It is hoped that systematic study of the light changes of all the variables, nearly two thousand in number, in the two Magellanic Clouds may soon be undertaken at this Observatory. View quote
Henrietta Swan Leavitt
Many times our media is confused. They say an US observatory has informed us about lunar and solar eclipse on a particular date. Don't look at an observatory, ask any pandit next to you. They will open the 'Panchang' and tell you the dates of eclipses 100 year ago and 100 years hence. View quote
Rajnath Singh
You hold the pen like a needle in a seismic observatory, and in fact it is not we who write, but rather we are written. Writing means to read oneself. (Max Frisch)
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. View quote
Simon Newcomb
OBSERVATORY, n. A place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of their predecessors. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
I was really into sci-fi books as a kid. My dad is a physicist and he used to take my brothers and I into his lab when we were little. We played games with liquid nitrogen and Van de Graaff generators. He had the keys to the observatory at St Andrew's University and he'd get us up in the middle of the night to show us Halley's Comet. That's partly why the album is called Eye To The Telescope. View quote
KT Tunstall
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. View quote
Timothy Ferriss
The ruling feature of his character was undoubtedly Order. ...He seems not to have destroyed a document of any kind whatever: counterfoils of old cheque-books, notes for tradesmen, circulars, bills, and correspondence of all sorts were carefully preserved in the most complete order... To a high appreciation of order he attributed in a great degree his command of mathematics, and sometimes spoke of mathematics as nothing more than a system of order carried to a considerable extent. In everything he was methodical and orderly, and he had the greatest dread of disorder creeping into the routine work of the Observatory, even in the smallest matters. View quote
George Biddell Airy
He never shirked arithmetical work: the longest and most laborious reductions had no terrors for him, and he was remarkably skilful with the various mathematical expedients for shortening and facilitating arithmetical work of a complex character. This power of handling arithmetic was of great value to him in the Observatory... He regarded it as a duty to finish off his work, whatever it was, and the writer well remembers his comment on the mathematics of one of his old friends, to the effect that "he was too fond of leaving a result in the form of three complex equations with three unknown quantities." View quote
George Biddell Airy