A Quote by Andrew Gould
For a long time, weve worked on detecting planets with whatever was at hand, making use of existing small telescopes or even amateur telescopes. Its time to move on to the next stage.
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I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.
You cannot exploit the advantages of getting above the atmosphere unless you are able to get up there reasonably large-sized telescopes and unless you are able to keep these telescopes pointing at one region of the sky for long periods of time to a high degree of accuracy.
Astronomers are obsessed with building larger and larger telescopes. There are two promises that we make with bigger telescopes: that they can see fainter things and that they see more detail. But it's been really hard to follow through on that second promise because of atmospheric distortion.
It bears mentioning that the Milky Way is only one of 150 billion galaxies visible to our telescopes - and each of these will have its own complement of planets.
In the next century or two, we humans will have planet-finder telescopes that span our solar system with mirrors strewn from here to Jupiter, giving us enormous angular resolution so we can do the kind of science that a self-respecting advanced civilization ought to be doing. We should someday be imaging the continents on other planets. We can't do that yet, but aliens can do that already, so they know we are here.
Great telescopes like the Kecks allow us to explore the River of Time back toward its source.
Yesterday, we sought telescopes good enough to see all the planets. Today, we seek vehicles good enough to reach them.
It used to be that, in astronomy, a small team of people could look at photos of a few thousand galaxies and classify and catalog them relatively easily. But now, with a new generation of robotic telescopes scanning the skies constantly and producing millions of images, that's become next to impossible.
'As a fraction of your tax dollar today, what is the total cost of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the space shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit, and missions yet to fly?' Answer: one-half of one percent of each tax dollar. Half a penny. I'd prefer it were more: perhaps two cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to little more than four cents on the tax dollar.
This Excellent Mathematician having given us, in the Transactions of February last, an account of the cause, which induced him to think upon Reflecting Telescopes, instead of Refracting ones, hath thereupon presented the curious world with an Essay of what may be performed by such Telescopes; by which it is found, that Telescopical Tubes may be considerably shortened without prejudice to their magnifiying effect. On his invention of the catadioptrical telescope, as he communicated to the Royal Society.
Data from orbiting telescopes like NASA's Kepler Mission hint that the tally of habitable planets in our galaxy is many billion. If E.T.'s not out there, then Earth is more than merely special - it's some sort of miracle.
We are now able to put our minds in other places in the universe with the use of telescopes. That is very exciting.
Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.
The eyes of a man are of no use without the observing power. Telescopes and microscopes are cunning contrivances, but they cannot see of themselves.
Those who pretend to investigate the transcendental truths of the Being based on pure reasoning fall in the same mistake as someone who, ignoring how to use the science's modern instruments, tries to study the life of what is infinitely small with telescopes and the life of what is infinitely large with microscopes.
The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.
