Observatory Quotes

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.

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.

I think if you let me, I’d build an observatory just to show you that all the stars in the universe will never shine as brightly as you.

Though we longed not to be lonely, we also feared the pain it would take us to be brought out of our lonely states. And after that fear, could we be guaranteed that we would never be returned to a state of loneliness again? We could not.

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

During relaxation we drop our guard. Particularly in conversation. Relaxed conversation leads to openness. And in openness we often reveal what should never be revealed.

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.

The Great Pyramid was not a lighthouse, an observatory, or a tomb, but the first temple of the Mysteries, the first structure erected as a repository for those secret truths which are the certain foundation of all arts and sciences.

I think if you let me, I'd build an observatory just to show you that all the stars in the universe will never shine as brightly as you.

Observatory n, A place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of their predecessors.

Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what’s going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all.

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.

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.

And no matter how much the gray people in power despise knowledge, they can’t do anything about historical objectivity; they can slow it down, but they can’t stop it. Despising and fearing knowledge, they will nonetheless inevitably decide to promote it in order to survive. Sooner or later they will be forced to allow universities and scientific societies, to create research centers, observatories, and laboratories, and thus to create a cadre of people of thought and knowledge: people who are completely beyond their control, people with a completely different psychology and with completely different needs. And these people cannot exist and certainly cannot function in the former atmosphere of low self-interest, banal preoccupations, dull self-satisfaction, and purely carnal needs. They need a new atmosphere— an atmosphere of comprehensive and inclusive learning, permeated with creative tension; they need writers, artists, composers— and the gray people in power are forced to make this concession too. The obstinate ones will be swept aside by their more cunning opponents in the struggle for power, but those who make this concession are, inevitably and paradoxically, digging their own graves against their will. For fatal to the ignorant egoists and fanatics is the growth of a full range of culture in the people— from research in the natural sciences to the ability to marvel at great music. And then comes the associated process of the broad intellectualization of society: an era in which grayness fights its last battles with a brutality that takes humanity back to the middle ages, loses these battles, and forever disappears as an actual force.

Is that why my ancestors built observatories and looked at the night sky? Did you want them to look at the place you came from?" "What funny thoughts you have," he said. What would I care about the heavens when I reside in the Underworld?" "I would care. All I could do sometimes was stare at the sky," she admitted. "Whatever for?" "Because it made me think one day I'd be free," she told him.

One painting was of an observatory, the other of a boy on a bluff. Both featured starry skies—and both, Mr. Benedict had told them, were the work of a childhood friend.

It is a little known fact that it takes an arthritic wolfhound exactly the same time to walk from the Palace Gate to the Wizard Tower as it takes a cohort of jinn to run the Ice Tunnel from the Observatory to the Wizard Tower.

Things don't always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope you find you're looking at a globular cluster—a million stars that, to us, presents as a single entity. On a less dramatic note there are triples, like Alpha Centauri, which up close turns out to be a double star and a red dwarf in close proximity. There's an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered observatory telescope. come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven young girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them. Make of it what you will.

I think that if you let me I'd treat you like the sky. I'd join up all your insecurities bundle all your flaws into a new constellation and search for it endlessly. I know you don't see yourself the way I see you and you will still argue when I call you beautiful. But all the things you can't stand about yourself are all the things I can't go a day without. I think if you let me I'd build an observatory just to show you that all the stars in the universe will never shine as bright as you.

A group of scientists led by Bärbel Hönisch, of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, recently reviewed the evidence for changing CO2 levels in the geologic past and concluded that, although there are several severe episodes of ocean acidification in the record, “no past event perfectly parallels” what is happening right now, owing to “the unprecedented rapidity of CO2 release currently taking place.” It turns out there just aren’t many ways to inject billions of tons of carbon into the air very quickly.

Turns out, while all light pollution is bad for astrophysics, the low-pressure sodium lamps are least bad because their contamination can be easily subtracted from telescope data. In a model of cooperation, the entire city of Tucson, Arizona, the nearest large municipality to the Kitt Peak National Observatory, has, by agreement with the local astrophysicists, converted all its streetlights to low-pressure sodium lamps.

The explorer for truth must first declare his independence. He must establish his observatory on hills of his own; he must establish it above the imaginary high planes of rulers, kings, professors of schools of all kinds and denominations. He must be the Czar of his own mental empire.

If you want to believe, then believe in honest conversations, believe in putting your best foot forward. Believe in the kindness of others, the warmth of the sun, the beauty of the ocean. Believe in slowing down and appreciating all of life’s most intimate and tiny details. Believe in wonder, adventure, and the nostalgia of marshmallows around campfires. Believe in art galleries, bookstores, observatories, and the power of other people’s stories.

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.

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.

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

This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

High altitude astronomical observatories tend to be windowless environments illuminated by florescent light.

Precisely,” Meredith smiled. “If they want to know where they are they’ll follow the time of the Royal Observatory. We shall call it Greenwich time,” he added.

And he led me up the stairs to the attic, where his homemade observatory let us mere mortals glimpse at the heavens.

Who could say what went on, at sunrise, in the thick woods below the planet-searching dome of the Observatory, which saw only space and stars?

Apropos of the observatory,

One o'clock on a dreary day and the time ball dropped at the Greenwich Observatory.

He told us to keep records of any lapses in behaviour, any godless speech, any shaking and tremors, and take any notes to the Observatory and post them into a Suspicions Box.

McDonald Observatory in Texas,

Astronomy management teams not informing me about the range of sickness that High Altitude Observatory Disease (HAOD) causes put my doctors in a land of misdiagnosis.

Astronomy needs to clean up its act and the first step in the right direction is the demolition of the biologically toxic Mauna Kea Observatories.

If you are a sea level adapted human, then your health is at risk by working at the biologically toxic Mauna Kea Observatories.

High Altitude Observatory Disease (HAOD) is like a ticking time bomb that explodes many years later.

It is a social responsibility to shut down the biologically toxic Mauna Kea Observatories (MKO).

After handling the observatory mercury systems, I had to start taking daily baths to calm down my hot skin pains. The baths were the only refuge from the terrible pains.

After a decade in high altitude astronomy, I concluded that astronomical observatories atop remote mountains are biologically harmful to sea level adapted humans.

cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in

the astronomy embodied in Stonehenge is not fundamentally deeper than what can be discovered with a stick in the ground. Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what’s going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all.

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.

The most amazing lightning I have seen has been at high altitude astronomical observatories. Watching a nearby tree being hit by lightning is an impressive sight and the explosion of sound is awesome!

Pluto is so far out that they can’t get decent photographs even at Luna Observatory. I had read articles in the Scientific American and seen pictures in LIFE, Bonestelled to look like photographs, and remembered that it was approaching its summer—if “summer” is the word for warm enough to melt air. I recalled that because they had announced that Pluto was showing an atmosphere as it got closer to the Sun.

To-night, as ages hence, people would say this, or shut their doors on them, turn in bereaved agony from them, or toward them with love saying: “That is our star up there, yours and mine”; steer by them above the clouds or lost at sea, or standing in the spray on the forecastle head, watch them, suddenly, careen; put their faith or lack of it in them; train, in a thousand observatories, feeble telescopes upon them, across whose lenses swam mysterious swarms of stars and clouds of dead dark stars, catastrophes of exploding suns, or giant Antares raging to its end—a smouldering ember yet five hundred times greater than the earth’s sun.

Vesto Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, was the first person to notice that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us—evidence that the universe was not, as everyone had long assumed, static.

Ongoing observations at Mount Wilson Observatory, above Pasadena, might confirm the last of the three original predictions of the general theory of relativity, the gravitational red-shifting of the light of high-density stars.

The man was old, too old for the war, and so he was charged with delivering its sorrow. I held the telegram and watched him walk back along the length of Observatory Street. His shoulders hunched under the weight of his satchel.

Among the many spots used by philosophers and astronomers over the centuries to mark the meridian for zero degrees longitude were Ferro, in the Canary Islands; Ujjain, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh; the “agonic line” (a line along which true north and magnetic north coincide, but not forever) that passed through the Azores; the Paris Observatory; the Royal Observatory at Greenwich; the White House; and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

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.

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.

I woke thinking: Is it possible that, after all, I am to go on living with the wild beasts while in the greater world others are out the peaks of the Himalayas, the dark heart of Arabia, and the secrets of the Poles--while in the civilized world electricity is spread to every corner, and the flying machine is invented--while in the laboratories and academies and astronomical observatories, by telescope and spectroscope and microscope, others are to discover the minute secrets of Life and the Universe--all this while I am living ignorant as a savage in the wilderness?

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 × 60 × 60 × 24 × 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.

In 1884, at the International Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., representatives from twenty-six countries voted to make the common practice official. They declared the Greenwich meridian the prime meridian of the world. This decision did not sit well with the French, however, who continued to recognize their own Paris Observatory meridian, a little more than two degrees east of Greenwich, as the starting line for another twenty-seven years, until 1911. (Even then, they hesitated to refer directly to Greenwich mean time, preferring the locution “Paris Mean Time, retarded by nine minutes twenty-one seconds.”)

that I suddenly found myself possessed by a mood of disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a conviction of the folly of attempting to benefit the world. Our especial scheme of reform, which, from my observatory, I could take in with the bodily eye, looked so ridiculous that it was impossible not to laugh aloud.

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.

Another human being, yet another I had never seen before. What did this one know? Was he happy? Was he cruel? Did he worry? The more I stared at his face, the less I understood him. This is not unusual, the same procedure happens whenever I examine a person either on photograph or in reality: in my first glimpses I always think I can read someone fairly quickly, that the snap judgements I make are surely accurate, but the more I observe the less I understand, the more I realize how difficult the art of judging a person is.

I made the mistake of using my earned sick time at the W. M. Keck Observatory for essential surgery. When I returned to work the management team demanded my resignation numerous times, citing my essential surgery as a reason. The W. M. Keck Observatory taught me that using earned sick time in the USA may put your future employment at significant risk.

Astronomy staff that routinely discharged industrial gas into the indoor environment at high altitudes did not wear oxygen deficiency monitors or protective breathing respirators.

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

To file a harassment complaint or not to file a harassment complaint, that is the question.

The Hale [telescope] is a refinery for light.

Dear Mauna Kea Observatories, I know that telescopes do not belong on sacred sites. I also know that you are willfully damaging your workers health by building astronomical observatories in known biologically toxic environments. As such, I now respectfully request your resignation from the very high altitude sacred mountain of Mauna Kea. Sincerely, Steven Magee, Damaged Mauna Kea worker.

To have done work which is widely recognized, to have gained the sincere esteem of many and the real love of even a few, surely these are sufficient reasons to look on life as well worth the living.

For a planet that’s roughly a third the size of Earth, Martian geology is extreme. Olympus Mons makes Mount Everest look like a sand castle. Olympus is so tall that it reaches beyond the bulk of the atmosphere. It would be a wonderful location for an astronomical observatory. If Valles Marineris were on Earth, it would be as though the Grand Canyon extended from New York to Los Angeles, consuming most of the U.S. along the way.

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

The eighty-ninth floor of the Taipei 101 tower is the observatory deck, where you can look out at the entire city through walls of glass. Buildings in miniature. Mountains layered in the distance like gentle strokes of watercolor, the farthest ones fogged and fading into the clouds. It’s a strange juxtaposition: the city so tightly packed, everything built so closely together—and beyond that, the sprawling greens and blues of lush forests.

Why the ancient civilizations who built the place did not use the easier, nearby rocks remains a mystery. But the skills and knowledge on display at Stonehenge are not. The major phases of construction took a total of a few hundred years. Perhaps the preplanning took another hundred or so. You can build anything in half a millennium - I don't care how far you choose to drag your bricks. Furthermore, the astronomy embodied in Stonehenge is not fundamentally deeper than what can be discovered with a stick in the ground. Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what's going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all.

Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid. Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived. Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light takes time to reach Earth’s observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were, back almost to the

Black holes generate sound. There’s one in the Perseus cluster of galaxies, 250 million light-years away. The signal was detected in 2003 in the form of X-rays (which will happily travel anywhere) by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory satellite. No one will ever hear it, though. It’s 57 octaves lower than middle C: over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing. It’s the deepest note ever detected from any object anywhere in the universe and it makes a noise in the pitch of B flat—the same as a vuvuzela.

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. *

At the age of 45, most days in Tucson were spent feeling like I was on the summit of Mauna Kea, as I was exhibiting debilitating health symptoms that corresponded to what I saw at very high altitude. I was later to find that I had erratic low blood oxygen levels after almost a decade of high altitude work.

This Saturday, Galle and a volunteer assistant, Heinrich Ludwig d’Arrest, command the main telescope. Galle stands at the eyepiece and guides the instrument, pointing toward Capricorn. As each star comes into view, he calls out its brightness and position. D’Arrest pores over a sky map, ticking off each candidate as it reveals itself as a familiar object. So it goes until, sometime between midnight and 1 A.M., Galle reels out the numbers for one more mote of light invisible to the naked eye: right ascension 21 h, 53 min, 25.84 seconds. D’Arrest glances down at the chart, then yelps: “that star is not on the map!” The younger man runs to fetch the observatory’s director, who earlier that day had only reluctantly given his permission to attempt what he seems to have thought a fool’s errand. Together, the trio continue to watch the new object until it sets at around 2:30 in the morning. True stars remain mere points in even the most powerful telescopes. This does not, showing instead an unmistakable disk, a full 3.2 arcseconds across—just as Le Verrier had told them to expect. That visible circle can mean just one thing: Galle has just become the first man to see what he knows to be a previously undiscovered planet, one that would come to be called Neptune, just about exactly where Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier told him to look. —

In a remarkable letter to the director of the Vatican Observatory, John Paul II wrote: The church does not propose that science should become religion or religion science. On the contrary, unity always presupposes the diversity and integrity of its elements. Each of these members should become not less itself but more itself in a dynamic interchange, for a unity in which one of the elements is reduced to the other is destructive, false in its promises of harmony, and ruinous of the integrity of its components. We are asked to become one. We are not asked to become each other. . . . Unity involves the drive of the human mind towards understanding and the desire of the human spirit for love. When human beings seek to understand the multiplicities that surround them, when they seek to make sense of experience, they do so by bringing many factors into a common vision. Understanding is achieved when many data are unified by a common structure. The one illuminates the many: it makes sense of the whole. . . . We move towards unity as we move towards meaning in our lives. Unity is also the consequence of love. If love is genuine, it moves not towards the assimilation of the other but towards union with the other. Human community begins in desire when that union has not been achieved, and it is completed in joy when those who have been apart are now united.10

Using the Mount Wilson Observatory, Harlow Shapley redefined our relationship to the cosmos, showing that the sun was not at the center of the Milky Way. Using it, Edwin Hubble created the whole field of cosmology, redefining again our place in the universe, our understanding of its vastness, and our ideas about its creation. Those discoveries did not bear any direct financial returns. They did not add to the national defense. But they did something far more important: they changed our lives and the way we think about ourselves. They are among the most profound discoveries of science, and they had no financial justification whatsoever. They were seeking truth and beauty amid chemistry and light.

Need more ego softeners? Simple comparisons of quantity, size, and scale do the job well. Take water. It’s common, and vital. There are more molecules of water in an eight-ounce cup of the stuff than there are cups of water in all the world’s oceans. Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid. Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived. Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light takes time to reach Earth’s observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were, back almost to the beginning of time itself. Within that horizon of reckoning, cosmic evolution unfolds continuously, in full view. Want

Mason bleakly exhales. “No Hell, then?” “Not inside the Earth, anyway.” “Nor any . . . Single Administrator of Evil.” “They did introduce me to some Functionary,— no telling,— We chatted, others came in. They ask’d if I’d take off as much of my Clothing as I’d feel comfortable with,— I stepp’d out of my Shoes, left my Hat on . . . ? They walk’d ’round me in Circles, now and then poking at me . . . ? Nothing too intrusive.” “Nothing you remember, anyway,” Mason can’t help putting in. “They peer’d into my Eyes and Ears, they look’d in my Mouth, they put me upon a Balance and weigh’d me. They conferr’d. ‘Are you quite sure, now,’ the Personage ask’d me at last, ‘that you wish to bet ev’ry-thing upon the Body?— this Body?— moreover, to rely helplessly upon the Daily Harvest your Sensorium brings in,— keeping in mind that both will decline, the one in Health as the other in Variety, growing less and less trustworthy till at last they are no more?’ Eeh. Well, what would thoo’ve said?” “So, did you— ” “We left it in abeyance. Arriv’d back at the Observatory, it seem’d but minutes, this time, in Transit, I sought my Bible, which I let fall open, and read, in Job, 26:5 through 7, ‘Dead things are formed from under the waters, and the inhabitants thereof. “ ‘Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering. “ ‘He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

The Scientific Revolution proposed a very different formula for knowledge: Knowledge = Empirical Data × Mathematics. If we want to know the answer to some question, we need to gather relevant empirical data, and then use mathematical tools to analyse the data. For example, in order to gauge the true shape of the earth, we can observe the sun, the moon and the planets from various locations across the world. Once we have amassed enough observations, we can use trigonometry to deduce not only the shape of the earth, but also the structure of the entire solar system. In practice, that means that scientists seek knowledge by spending years in observatories, laboratories and research expeditions, gathering more and more empirical data, and sharpening their mathematical tools so they could interpret the data correctly. The scientific formula for knowledge led to astounding breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, medicine and countless other disciplines. But it had one huge drawback: it could not deal with questions of value and meaning. Medieval pundits could determine with absolute certainty that it is wrong to murder and steal, and that the purpose of human life is to do God’s bidding, because scriptures said so. Scientists could not come up with such ethical judgements. No amount of data and no mathematical wizardry can prove that it is wrong to murder. Yet human societies cannot survive without such value judgements.

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.

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.† These waves, predicted by Einstein, are ripples moving at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time, and are generated by severe gravitational disturbances, such as the collision of two black holes. And that’s exactly what was observed. The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

Alone in the observatory late one night, I heard the telephone ring persistently. When I answered, a voice, betraying a well-advanced state of inebriation, said, “Lemme talk to a shtrominer.” “Can I help you?” “Well, see, we’re havin’ this garden party out here in Wilmette, and there’s somethin’ in the sky. The funny part is, though, if you look straight at it, it goes away. But if you don’t look at it, there it is.” The most sensitive part of the retina is not at the center of the field of view. You can see faint stars and other objects by averting your vision slightly. I knew that, barely visible in the sky at this time, was a newly discovered comet called Arend-Roland. So I told him that he was probably looking at a comet. There was a long pause, followed by the query: “Wash’ a comet?” “A comet,” I replied, “is a snowball one mile across.” There was a longer pause, after which the caller requested, “Lemme talk to a real shtrominer.

Saint John Paul II wrote, “when its concepts and conclusions can be integrated into the wider human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value.”7 Religion, too, develops best when its doctrines are not abstract and fixed in an ancient past but integrated into the wider stream of life. Albert Einstein once said that “science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind.”8 So too, John Paul II wrote: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”9 Teilhard de Chardin saw that dialogue alone between the disciplines is insufficient; what we need is a new synthesis of science and religion, drawing insights from each discipline into a new unity. In a remarkable letter to the director of the Vatican Observatory, John Paul II wrote: The church does not propose that science should become religion or religion science. On the contrary, unity always presupposes the diversity and integrity of its elements. Each of these members should become not less itself but more itself in a dynamic interchange, for a unity in which one of the elements is reduced to the other is destructive, false in its promises of harmony, and ruinous of the integrity of its components. We are asked to become one. We are not asked to become each other. . . . Unity involves the drive of the human mind towards understanding and the desire of the human spirit for love. When human beings seek to understand the multiplicities that surround them, when they seek to make sense of experience, they do so by bringing many factors into a common vision. Understanding is achieved when many data are unified by a common structure. The one illuminates the many: it makes sense of the whole. . . . We move towards unity as we move towards meaning in our lives. Unity is also the consequence of love. If love is genuine, it moves not towards the assimilation of the other but towards union with the other. Human community begins in desire when that union has not been achieved, and it is completed in joy when those who have been apart are now united.10 The words of the late pope highlight the core of catholicity: consciousness of belonging to a whole and unity as a consequence of love.

Among much else, Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggested that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. But Einstein was not a cosmologist, and he accepted the prevailing wisdom that the universe was fixed and eternal. More or less reflexively, he dropped into his equations something called the cosmological constant, which arbitrarily counterbalanced the effects of gravity, serving as a kind of mathematical pause button. Books on the history of science always forgive Einstein this lapse, but it was actually a fairly appalling piece of science and he knew it. He called it “the biggest blunder of my life.” Coincidentally, at about the time that Einstein was affixing a cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, an astronomer with the cheerily intergalactic name of Vesto Slipher (who was in fact from Indiana) was taking spectrographic readings of distant stars and discovering that they appeared to be moving away from us. The universe wasn’t static. The stars Slipher looked at showed unmistakable signs of a Doppler shift‖—the same mechanism behind that distinctive stretched-out yee-yummm sound cars make as they flash past on a racetrack. The phenomenon also applies to light, and in the case of receding galaxies it is known as a red shift (because

Holding a precious book meant to Mendel what an assignment with a woman might to another man. These moments were his platonic nights of love. Books had power over him; money never did. Great collectors, including the founder of a collection in Princeton University Library, tried in vain to recruit him as an adviser and buyer for their libraries—Jakob Mendel declined; no one could imagine him anywhere but in the Café Gluck. Thirty-three years ago, when his beard was still soft and black and he had ringlets over his forehead, he had come from the east to Vienna, a crook-backed lad, to study for the rabbinate, but he had soon abandoned Jehovah the harsh One God to give himself up to idolatry in the form of the brilliant, thousand-fold polytheism of books. That was when he had first found his way to the Café Gluck, and gradually it became his workplace, his headquarters, his post office, his world. Like an astronomer alone in his observatory, studying myriads of stars every night through the tiny round lens of the telescope, observing their mysterious courses, their wandering multitude as they are extinguished and then appear again, so Jakob Mendel looked through his glasses out from that rectangular table into the other universe of books, also eternally circling and being reborn in that world above our own.

Spațiile lui Riemann sunt lipsite de orice fel de omogenitate. Fiecare dintre ele se caracterizează prin forma expresiei care definește pătratul distanței dintre două puncte infinit învecinate. ... Rezultă de aici că doi observatori aflați învecinați pot să repereze într-un spațiu riemannian punctele care se află în imediata lor vecinătate, dar nu pot, fără stabilirea unei noi convenții, să se repereze unul față de celălalt. Fiecare vecinătate este deci ca o mică bucată de spațiu euclidian, dar racordarea dintre o vecinătate și următoarea nu e definită și poate fi făcută într-o infinitate de moduri. Spațiul riemannian cel mai general se prezintă, astfel, ca o colecție amorfă de bucăți juxtapuse fără a fi legate’ (Albert Lautmann, Les schèmas de structure, Hermann, 1938, pp.23, 34-35); această mulțime poate fi definită independent de orice referire la o metrică, prin condiții de frecvență sau, mai curând, de acumulare valabile pentru un ansamblu de vecinătăți, condiții total diferite de cele care determină spațiile metrice și tăieturile lor (chiar dacă un raport între cele două feluri de spațiu trebuie să decurgă de aici). Pe scurt, dacă urmăm frumoasa descriere a lui Lautmann, spațiul riemannian este un pur patchwork. Are conexiuni sau raporturi tactile. Are valori ritmice care nu se regăsesc în altă parte, chiar dacă pot fi traduse într-un spațiu metric. Eterogen, în variație continuă, este un spațiu neted, în măsura în care este amorf, nu omogen. (Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari)

Then came a series of wondrous discoveries, beginning in 1924, by Edwin Hubble, a colorful and engaging astronomer working with the 100-inch reflector telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in the mountains above Pasadena, California. The first was that the blur known as the Andromeda nebula was actually another galaxy, about the size of our own, close to a million light years away (we now know it’s more than twice that far). Soon he was able to find at least two dozen even more distant galaxies (we now believe that there are more than 100 billion of them). Hubble then made an even more amazing discovery. By measuring the red shift of the stars’ spectra (which is the light wave counterpart to the Doppler effect for sound waves), he realized that the galaxies were moving away from us. There were at least two possible explanations for the fact that distant stars in all directions seemed to be flying away from us: (1) because we are the center of the universe, something that since the time of Copernicus only our teenage children believe; (2) because the entire metric of the universe was expanding, which meant that everything was stretching out in all directions so that all galaxies were getting farther away from one another. It became clear that the second explanation was the case when Hubble confirmed that, in general, the galaxies were moving away from us at a speed that was proportional to their distance from us. Those twice as far moved away twice as fast, and those three times as far moved away three times as fast.

The sickest high altitude workers that I encountered in professional astronomy were at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, USA.

Workplace harassment was a feature of USA professional astronomy.

Reber’s telescope, though without precedent, was small and crude by today’s standards. Modern radio telescopes are quite another matter. Unbound by backyards, they’re sometimes downright humongous. MK 1, which began its working life in 1957, is the planet’s first genuinely gigantic radio telescope—a single, steerable, 250-foot-wide, solid-steel dish at the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Manchester, England. A couple of months after MK 1 opened for business, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, and Jodrell Bank’s dish suddenly became just the thing to track the little orbiting hunk of hardware—making it the forerunner of today’s Deep Space Network for tracking planetary space probes

Indeed, this was the dirty little secret about the Copernican theory. None of it could be confirmed with direct evidence. Copernicus had come up with the notion that the earth must be going around the sun along with the other planets without making any new astronomical observations. He had simply found the idea in a book on the ancient Greek mathematician Aristarchus.§ Again, the chief reason Copernicus did not publish his theory during his lifetime was not that he feared the disapproval of the Church—he was worried it was so contrary to our everyday experience, it would be laughed off the stage.26 Nothing any astronomer had ever seen, not even Tycho Brahe’s meticulous observations from his island observatory outside Copenhagen, confirmed any aspect of it. Brahe himself felt perfectly comfortable sticking to the old geocentric theory.

Defund Mauna Kea Observatories.

The leading research on High Altitude Observatory Diseases (HAOD) is coming out of the USA from a British Chartered Engineer.

One day, years later, the soldiers wheeled around to find themselves in a city of glass. Their rifles turned to carnival glass; bullets dissolved, glittering, in their hands. From the poet’s zoo they heard monkeys cry; from the poet’s observatory they heard poem after poem like a call to prayer.

I never intended to lead an army. Never intended to take responsibility for the lives of these Seasons or their Handlers back at the Observatory. I never intended to fight.

I was always eating the subsidized food from the high altitude cafeteria in professional astronomy. It was free, so I would eat it. The food was low quality at every astronomical observatory I worked at.

The food was so bad at the La Palma astronomical observatory that I stopped eating there.

I ate a lot of ice cream at the W. M. Keck Observatory! Everyone else was eating the free cooked breakfast. I would eat that and feel lousy on the very high altitude Mauna Kea summit. I felt better on the bowl of ice cream. I was well known for eating ice cream for breakfast!

Monday night marked our first Astrology Class in the Earth Observatory. And it didn't start until eight o'clock. I was distracted during my Liaison while Orion sat across his desk from me, attempting to explain Nymph anatomy in greater detail while I tried not to wonder what those lips would feel like against more places than my neck. I bet his kisses taste like bourbon and power. “Miss Vega?” I blinked, snapping myself out of my latest dirty daydream as Orion rose from his seat. “Time's up,” he answered my questioning expression. “I'm so glad I didn't waste my time tonight. You've been listening so attentively.” His narrowed eyes told me that was sarcasm and I gave him an apologetic grin. Well I had fun anyway. I gathered up my bag, wishing I could head back to my room, have a shower and change out of this uniform. But according to the email I'd received when the class had been added to my timetable, we had to turn up dressed in the Zodiac uniform even for lessons after hours. “I'll walk you back to your House,” Orion said. “And maybe on the way you can tell me exactly what you've spent the last hour thinking about.” He strode toward the door with a smirk and I followed him across the room, my heart pitter-pattering. “No thanks, I've got Astrology now, sir,” I said, saying absolutely nothing more about my daydreams. Those can never see the light of day. “Then I'll take you to Earth Observatory.” Orion stepped out into the hall, waiting for me as I followed. I frowned at him. “I think I can manage a ten minute walk alone.” “Well I'm heading in that direction anyway so we may as well go together.” Orion headed off and I fell into step beside him, fighting an eye-roll. We headed onto the path beyond Jupiter Hall and a yawn pulled at my mouth as we turned in the direction of Earth Observatory. Students were spilling out of The Orb heading back to their Houses, but I wasn't jealous. Despite the long-ass day I'd had, I was excited to attend my first ever Astrology class. Supposedly our schedule was going to fill up even more once we passed The Reckoning. Or if we passed it. God I hope we do. We might end up back in Chicago after all. Even Darius’s gold doesn’t make me feel much better about that. I spent most of my free time practising Elemental magic with Tory and the others in preparation for the exam. Orion was still refusing to teach us anything practical in class, and I half wondered if his vague promises of practical lessons would really ever come to fruition. I stole a look at him as we walked in perfect silence, finding it surprisingly not awkward. I noticed the deep set of his eyes, the way his shoulders were slightly tense and his fingers were flexing a little. “Are you expecting an ambush?” I teased and he glanced my way, his expression deadly serious. “You should always expect an ambush, Miss Vega.” “Oh,” I breathed, figuring he was probably right considering the way the Fae world carried on. I'd not really thought about what it might be like to live somewhere beyond the walls of the Academy. Would it be just as cut-throat out there as it was in here? “Darcy!” Sofia's voice caught my attention and I spotted her up ahead with Diego, standing outside the observatory. She beckoned me over and I stopped walking, looking to Orion to say goodbye. He turned to me too and a strange energy passed between us as we simply stood there for much longer than was necessary. Why are we even stopping to say goodbye? Why am I not just walking away now? He half tipped his head then shot away at high-speed, disappearing back the way we'd come. So he hadn’t been heading this way. I knew it. His casual stalking was clearly to do with his worries over a Nymph getting its probes into my magic. “Daaarccccyy!” Sofia sang and I turned back to them, finding her on Diego's back, waving her arms. (Darcy)

DELTA GEMINORUM and PLUTO. The new planet (arrow) is shown here shortly after discovery at Lowell Observatory, in February 1930. Date of Photograph is March 4, 1930.

When I worked at the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii, it was a mismanaged group of telescopes with many OSHA workplace violations.

The management teams of the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii were withholding key health and safety information from workers and there was a secret culture of taking lone workers into surprise meetings where the management team would harass them for their ‘voluntary’ resignations.

By the time I left the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii, I was aware the management teams were engaging in illegal activities.

One of the joys of being an Observing Assistant at the W. M. Keck Observatory was watching the scientists I had worked with going on to win the Nobel Prize.

There was a management culture of harassing workers out of their jobs through ‘voluntary’ resignations at the biologically toxic Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii.

Once I found the correct supplements, recovery occurred quickly. The medical profession could not figure it out during 16 years of regular doctor visits! I went to the doctors from 2005 to to 2021 with a wide range of health issues. I gave up on them and figured it out myself! I started to see weird health issues at the La Palma Observatory and working extreme night shifts atop very high altitude 13,800 feet Mauna Kea Observatory was the end of my health, I was sick constantly after that.

As he got closer to Fort Davis, he spotted the ranchettes with outbuildings sporting retractable roofs. This area was filling up with amateur astronomers, drawn to the dark sky and the nearby McDonald Observatory.

Samuel Pierpont Langley, chief astronomer of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Observatory, who innovated the sale of time

The First Amendment was meant to protect society. And ad targeting that prioritized clicks and salacious content and data mining of users was antithetical to the ideals of a healthy society. The dangers present in Facebook’s algorithms were “being co-opted and twisted by politicians and pundits howling about censorship and miscasting content moderation as the demise of free speech online,” in the words of Renée DiResta, a disinformation researcher at Stanford’s Internet Observatory. “There is no right to algorithmic amplification. In fact, that’s the very problem that needs fixing.

Calculating that the patch of sky she wanted would be in the telescope at around two o’clock in the morning, she decided on no sleep till Belfast, and headed over to the observatory.

Sixteenth-century Danish nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe was the greatest naked-eye astronomer and an interesting character. His colorful past included being kidnapped by his uncle, being given an island, constructing a state-of-the-art and gorgeous observatory, being evicted from his island only to have his observatory destroyed by the islanders after his departure, and wearing a metal prosthetic nose after having the tip of his own nose cut off during a mathematics-inspired duel. Brahe died in 1601 as a result of a burst bladder after he held his pee too long.

The famed Arecibo Observatory was repurposed into a national research center in 1969 after being taken over by the National Science Foundation.  It relied not only on the uniqueness of Puerto Rico’s limestone sinkholes, but also the island’s proximity to the equator.  Not only did it hold the record of being the largest single-dish radio telescope on Earth for the last four decades, it also had the honor of producing some of the most historic radio-based observations in human history.

If the archive is to serve as an effective social observatory, it will only do so through the scattered details which have broken through, and which form a gap-riddled puzzle of obscure events.

He lives in the sticks, near Kielder.’ ‘Lucky man.’ Hedley paused. ‘Did you know it’s the darkest place in Europe? There’s an observatory up there, open to the public. You should check it out. It’s absolutely magic.

The painting now hangs in the gallery at the Old Royal Observatory. It shows Harrison as a man to be reckoned with. Dressed in a chocolate brown frock coat and britches, he sits surrounded by his inventions, including H-3 at his right and the precision gridiron-pendulum regulator, which he built to rate his other timepieces, behind him. Even seated he assumes an erect bearing and a look of self-satisfied, but not smug, accomplishment. He wears a gentleman’s white wig and has the clearest, smoothest skin imaginable. (The story of Harrison’s becoming fascinated with watch-works in childhood, while recuperating from an illness, holds that he suffered a severe case of smallpox at the time. We must conclude, however, that the tale is tall, or that he experienced a miraculous recovery, or that the artist has painted out the scars.)

Her responsibilities included not only those symbolic and administrative functions one would expect of a religious figurehead, but also overseeing and expansion of the astronomical structures of the empire’s observatory network.

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.

During this time, discoveries have accumulated consistently, in practically all fields of science, providing abundant evidence of the existence of a Something or Someone that we identify with what is traditionally considered a Creator God. This is not just a matter of new philosophical proofs for what we call God but, rather, a cascade of discoveries in observatories and laboratories that “impose the idea of God,” as one of the founders of quantum physics, Max Planck, put it.

in 1931 Edwin Hubble invited Einstein to the observatory of the Hooker Telescope near Pasadena, California, and showed him that, in fact, the universe was expanding. Einstein then pronounced one of his most famous sentences: “Now I see the necessity of a beginning,” a lofty phrase followed by another equally famous but more earthly remark, “That was the biggest blunder of my whole life,”113 referring to the gravitational constant that he had devised in order to adjust the Theory of Relativity. In an ironic twist, the gravitational constant then proved to exist, although not in the magnitude that Einstein attributed to it. We will see this further on.

There was no monitoring of astronomy staff for central sleep apnea, even when we would sleep at high altitude.

I expect the name ‘Steven Magee’ will become associated with the reform of the corrupt aspects of professional astronomy.

Pope was almost reverent about the subject. “Trees provide this world-scale observatory. There’s information that has been hiding all around us all this time. It’s amazing that if you go and touch a bristlecone pine, in its body—encoded in ways that we can’t see—are measures of extreme astrophysical events.

The moon is full, and it casts a glow on the darkened forest, the groans of wind the only sound other than the occasional howl from feral wolves and the hoots from owls that frequent the observatory windows at night.

As the new medical conditions of ‘Magee's Disease’, ‘Summit Brain’ and ‘Altitude Hypersensitivity’ become more well known and understood, I expect this will eventually lead to the removal of all astronomical industrial observatories atop Mauna Kea.

Decades of desecrating Hawaii’s most sacred spaces with industrial astronomical observatories atop spiritual Hawaiian mountains appears to be in the process of ending.

Living in Hawaii and working at the world’s largest telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory was my September 11th 2001.

One nice touch about Christy’s discovery was that it happened in Flagstaff, for it was there in 1930 that Pluto had been found in the first place. That seminal event in astronomy was largely to the credit of the astronomer Perdval Lowell. Lowell, who came from one of the oldest and wealthiest Boston families (the one in the famous ditty about Boston being the home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells spoke only to Cabots, while Cabots spoke only to God), endowed the famous observatory that bears his name, but is most indelibly remembered for his belief that Mars was covered with canals built by industrious Martians for purposes of conveying water from polar regions to the dry but productive lands nearer the equator. Lowell’s other abiding conviction was that there existed, somewhere out beyond Neptune, an undiscovered ninth planet dubbed, Planet X. Lowell based this belief on irregularities he detected in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, and devoted the last years of his life to trying to find the gassy giant he was certain was out there. Unfortunately, he died suddenly in 1916, at least partly exhausted by his quest and the search fell into abeyance while Lowell’s heirs squabbled over his estate. However, in 1929, partly as a way of deflecting attention away from the Mars canal saga (which by now had become a serious embarrassment), the Lowell Observatory directors decided to resume the search and to that end hired a young man from Kansas named Clyde Tombaugh. Tombaugh had no formal training as an astronomer, but he was diligent and he was astute, and after a year’s patient searching he somehow spotted Pluto, a faint point of light in a glittery firmament. It was a miraculous find, and what made it all the more striking was that the observations on which Lowell had predicted the existence of a planet beyond Neptune proved to be comprehensively erroneous. Tombaugh could see at once that the new planet was nothing like the massive gasball Lowell had postulated, but any reservations he or anyone else had about the character of the new planet were soon swept aside in the delirium that attended almost any big news story in that easily excited age. This was the first American-discovered planet and no one was going to be distracted by the thought that it was really just a distant icy dot. It was named Pluto at least partly because the first two letters made a monogram from Lowell’s initials. Lowell was posthumously hailed everywhere as a genius of the first order, and Tombaugh was largely forgotten, except among planetary astronomers, who tend to revere him.

To accommodate the vast scale of the work needed to translate, copy, study and store the volumes of Sanskrit, Aramaic, Hebrew, Persian, Armenian and Greek texts that were being accumulated in Baghdad, al-Mansur, his grandson al-Mamnun and his great-grandson Harun al-Rashid all generously patronised a royal library and astronomical observatory modelled on those of the great Persian kings. In time the institution became known in Arabic as the Bayt al-Hikma, or the ‘House of Wisdom’ or sometimes the ‘Treasury of the Books of Wisdom’.60 It eventually came to rival Nalanda as the largest library of the early medieval world.61

The tears roll down burning my face. The Observatory is closed. You kindly explain that all is fine, since I am the one digesting the story again, I have the power to fix the end, to which I say, ‘You’re right, so I just made the key.

The structure of de Prony’s computing office cannot be easily seen in Smith’s example. His computing staff had two distinct classes of workers. The larger of these was a staff of nearly ninety computers. These workers were quite different from Smith’s pin makers or even from the computers at the British Nautical Almanac and the Connaissance des Temps. Many of de Prony’s computers were former servants or wig dressers, who had lost their jobs when the Revolution rendered the elegant styles of Louis XVI unfashionable or even treasonous.35 They were not trained in mathematics and held no special interest in science. De Prony reported that most of them “had no knowledge of arithmetic beyond the two first rules [of addition and subtraction].”36 They were little different from manual workers and could not discern whether they were computing trigonometric functions, logarithms, or the orbit of Halley’s comet. One labor historian has described them as intellectual machines, “grasping and releasing a single piece of ‘data’ over and over again.”37 The second class of workers prepared instructions for the computation and oversaw the actual calculations. De Prony had no special title for this group of workers, but subsequent computing organizations came to use the term “planning committee” or merely “planners,” as they were the ones who actually planned the calculations. There were eight planners in de Prony’s organization. Most of them were experienced computers who had worked for either the Bureau du Cadastre or the Paris Observatory. A few had made interesting contributions to mathematical theory, but the majority had dealt only with the problems of practical mathematics.38 They took the basic equations for the trigonometric functions and reduced them to the fundamental operations of addition and subtraction. From this reduction, they prepared worksheets for the computers. Unlike Nevil Maskelyne’s worksheets, which gave general equations to the computers, these sheets identified every operation of the calculation and left nothing for the workers to interpret. Each step of the calculation was followed by a blank space for the computers to fill with a number. Each table required hundreds of these sheets, all identical except for a single unique starting value at the top of the page. Once the computers had completed their sheets, they returned their results to the planners. The planners assembled the tables and checked the final values. The task of checking the results was a substantial burden in itself. The group did not double-compute, as that would have obviously doubled the workload. Instead the planners checked the final values by taking differences between adjacent values in order to identify miscalculated numbers. This procedure, known as “differencing,” was an important innovation for human computers. As one observer noted, differencing removed the “necessity of repeating, or even of examining, the whole of the work done by the [computing] section.”39 The entire operation was overseen by a handful of accomplished scientists, who “had little or nothing to do with the actual numerical work.” This group included some of France’s most accomplished mathematicians, such as Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752–1833) and Lazare-Nicolas-Marguerite Carnot (1753–1823).40 These scientists researched the appropriate formulas for the calculations and identified potential problems. Each formula was an approximation, as no trigonometric function can be written as an exact combination of additions and subtractions. The mathematicians analyzed the quality of the approximations and verified that all the formulas produced values adequately close to the true values of the trigonometric functions.

What do you know about the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory?” “Never heard of it.” “It’s a big, two-million-pound bottle of heavy water over a mile below ground in a nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario. The whole thing is surrounded by a sixty-foot-thick array of photomultiplier tubes and is suspended in a huge tank of light water.

The Giza Plateau was an observatory machine which were engineered using a level of sophistication that is found in Theology rather than in Technology.

Don Fabrizio remembered a conversation with Father Pirrone some months before in the sunlit observatory. What the Jesuit had predicted had come to pass. But wasn’t it perhaps good tactics to insert himself into the new movement, make at least part use of it for a few members of his own class? The worry of his imminent interview with Don Calogero lessened. “But the rest of his family, Don Ciccio, what are they really like?” “Excellency, no one has laid eyes on Don Calogero’s wife for years, except me. She only leaves the house to go to early Mass, the five o’clock one, when it’s empty. There’s no organ-playing at that hour; but once I got up early just to see her. Donna Bastiana came in with her maid, and as I was hiding behind a confessional I could not see very much; but at the end of Mass the heat was too great for the poor woman and she took off her black veil. Word of honour, Excellency, she was lovely as the sun, one can’t blame Don Calogero, who’s a beetle of a man, for wanting to keep her away from others. But even in the best kept houses secrets come out; servants talk; and it seems Donna Bastiana is a kind of animal: she can’t read or write or tell the time by a clock, can scarcely talk; just a beautiful mare, voluptuous and uncouth; she’s incapable even of affection for her own daughter! Good for bed and that’s all.” Don Ciccio, who, as protégé of queens and follower of princes, considered his own simple manners to be perfect, smiled with pleasure. He had found a way of getting some of his own back on the suppressor of his personality. “Anyway,” he went on, “one couldn’t expect much else. You know whose daughter Donna Bastiana is, Excellency?” He turned, rose on tiptoe, pointed to a distant group of huts which looked as if they were slithering off the edge of the hill, nailed there just by a wretched-looking bell-tower: a crucified hamlet. “She’s the daughter of one of your peasants from Runci, Peppe Giunta he was called, so filthy and so crude that everyone called him Peppe “Mmerda” . . . excuse the word, Excellency.” Satisfied, he twisted one of Teresina’s ears round a finger. “Two years after Don Calogero had eloped with Bastiana they found him dead on the path to Rampinzeri, with twelve bullets in his back. Always lucky, is Don Calogero, for the old man was getting above himself and demanding, they say.” Much of this was known to Don Fabrizio and had already been balanced up in his mind; but the nickname of Angelica’s grandfather was new to him; it opened a profound historical perspective, and made him glimpse other abysses compared to which Don Calogero himself seemed a garden flowerbed. The Prince began to feel the ground giving way under his feet; how ever could Tancredi swallow this? And what about himself? He found himself trying to work out the relationship between the Prince of Salina, uncle of the bridegroom, and the grandfather of the bride; he found none, there wasn’t any. Angelica was just Angelica, a flower of a girl, a rose merely fertilised by her grandfather’s nickname. Non olet, he repeated, non olet; in fact optime foeminam ac contuberninum olet.

Mauna Kea Sickness (MKS) was a mystery that needed to be solved.

I will use science to shut down the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea.

When I saw how many people were objecting to the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea, I realized that there needed to be an open and honest discussion about the toxicity of the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit and the health and safety issues of astronomical observatories.

The most deformed AC voltage sine wave that I have seen in my career was at a high altitude astronomical observatory where I worked for almost three years. I eventually became so sick sitting next to the electrical room daily that I had no option but to leave.

The Soviet counterpart to the Green Bank meeting, the First All-Union Conference on Extraterrestrial Civilizations and Interstellar Communication, was held in May 1964, at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Soviet Armenia. Perhaps less concerned about the “ridicule barrier” and any public threat to research funding in their more centralized scientific enterprise, the Soviet scientists were eager to publish their papers. So this is the first SETI meeting for which published proceedings exist. The

Edwin Hubble escaped the glare of ‘Orange county’ by retreating to a mountaintop observatory north of Pasadena, where he recorded the motions of the galaxies that led to his discovery of the expanding universe. But it wasn’t sodium that caused him difficulties. Potassium burns with a mauve flame which can sometimes be seen in a gunpowder explosion or when lighting a match. One night Hubble was excited to detect a potassium spectrum while he examined the galaxies through the world’s most powerful telescope. But it soon became apparent that the reading must be false. Eventually Hubble realized that the equipment had picked up the light from the potassium in the match that he had used to light his pipe.

And I suddenly feel like Pinocchio after he’s been swallowed; dome roof with curved steel beams like a whale’s ribs, the moon and Milky Way right there at the yawning shutter of its mouth.

...men are capable of perceiving the Pyramid in an astonishing number of ways. Some have thought the Pyramid was an astronomic and astrological observatory. Some have thought it functioned as the equivalent of a theodolite for surveyors in ancient times... Some think it performed as a giant sundial... Some think it records the mathematics and science of a civilization which vanished... Some think it is a huge water pump. Others have thought it was filled with fabulous treasures... One early investigator came away convinced it was the remains of a huge volcano. Another thought the pyramids were Joseph's granaries. Some thought they were heathen idols which should be destroyed. Some believe the Pyramid captures powerful cosmic energies... Some think it is a tomb. Some think it is a Bible in stone with prophecies built into the scheme of its internal passages... Some think it was a mammoth public works project which consolidated the position of the pharaoh and the unity of the nation. Some think it was built by beings from outer space. Some say it was a temple of initiation. Some hold that it was an instrument of science. Some believe it is an altar of Guild built through direct Divine Revelation. And today, judging by the uses to which it has been put, some apparently think it is an outhouse.

I actually visited the Palomar Observatory to look through that famous telescope. And as I looked back into billions of years of history from that device, I could not find a single reason why this goddamn club is giving a dinner for a son of a bitch like Buddy Hackett.” It

A combination of orbiting and ground-based observatories paired with high performance computing installations. “They’re

If the end of the world could be localized in a precise spot, it would be the meteorological observatory of Pëtkwo: a corrugated-iron roof that rests on four somewhat shaky poles and houses, lined up on a shelf, some recording barometers, hygrometers, and thermographs, with their rolls of lined paper, which turn with a slow clockwork ticking against an oscillating nib. The vane of an anemometer at the top of a tall antenna and the squat funnel of a pluviometer complete the fragile equipment of the observatory, which, isolated on the edge of an escarpment in the municipal garden, against the pearl-gray sky, uniform and motionless, seems a trap for cyclones, a lure set there to attract waterspouts from the remote tropical oceans, offering itself already as the ideal relict of the fury of the hurricanes.

Critical to the recognition of workplace suicides as a social phenomenon in France has been the role of a new syndicalist structure created in 2007, the Observatory of Stress and Forced Mobility (L’Observatoire du stress et des mobilités forcées). In the face of intense hostility by company bosses and mainstream trade unions, the Observatory succeeded in bringing suicides to public attention, attracting widespread media coverage and pursuing France Télécom bosses before the courts.

Libre el bebé y fajado el hombre, la pediatra de adultos, Dama Ciencia abre su consultorio, hay que evitar que el hombre se deforme por exceso de sueños, fajarle la visión, manearle el sexo, enseñarle a contar para que todo tenga un número. A la par la moral y la ciencia (no se asombre, señora, es tan frecuente) y por supuesto la sociedad que sólo sobrevive si sus células cumplen el programa.

Iniziai a camminare pensieroso per le strade di Londra, sperando forse di poterla rivedere almeno un’ultima volta ancora. Camden Town, King’s Cross St Pancras, Green Park e così Embankment e St Jame’s Park; lungo il Thames nel parco del Greenwich observatory e poi ancora a Bank: Londra sembrava diventare triste e vuota. Anche London Bridge, Knights Bridge o Millennium Bridge, sembravano essersi spogliati del loro fascino, come accadde per Backingham Palace e Westminster Palace. Era davvero giunta l’ora di lasciare l’Inghilterra.

The Keeling Curve Courtesy the NASA Earth Observatory. NASA graph by Robert Simmon, based on data provided by the NOAA Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory.   If the scientific story of global warming has one great hero, he is James Hansen, and not only because he is the most important climatologist of his era, whose massive computer models were demonstrating by the early 1980s that increased CO2 posed a dire threat.

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

He found a location in the north of the island from where to view the transit, but it was too late to build a proper observatory. Instead he placed some big boulders in a circle and constructed a small hut to house the instruments. It was so crudely built that it gave little protection from wind, dust and animals. The instruments had already suffered from the long sea voyage with some ‘eaten by rust’, Pingré moaned, hectically polishing and greasing them with turtle oil, the only lubricant available. Over the next days, the French astronomer prepared his instruments and observed the movements of Jupiter’s satellites at night in order to set the clock – an enterprise that was sabotaged by the rats that chewed through one of the pendulums. At

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.

Speculating and predicting what lies beyond the boundary ins fascinating. Finding out is even more fascinating.

misguided to ask whether the Big Bang theory would provide evidence for or against a scriptural story of Creation; the Big Bang Theory is a scientific theory, concerned with physical causes that are proximate and contingent. And it’s wrong to ask whether a scriptural story of Creation would provide evidence for or against the Big Bang theory; scriptural stories of Creation are concerned with ultimate origins and with humanity’s personal relationship with God. Those are the wrong questions for the tools at hand.

One of the biggest lies that is currently being told in the USA workplace is on the legally required OSHA poster: All workers have the right to a safe workplace.

The U.S. Navy also continues to use undersea cables; but unlike the oil industry or scientific observatories, it keeps its systems (informally termed black fiber) secret and rarely opens them to the public.

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

When I worked at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, we would routinely be engulfed in cold clouds of helium and nitrogen gas as we discharged it into the video camera systems daily. The management team never warned us that we were in a hazardous oxygen deprived environment during this activity that was known for its ability to adversely affect physical and mental health, and possibly bring on death by asphyxiation.

At the age of 46 I was starting to see the appearance of rainbow halos and starbursts around bright nighttime lights, problems reading small print, focusing issues with my eyes, and image recognition issues. I had been exposed to bright high powered 20 watt scattered sodium LASER light a decade earlier in very high altitude astronomy.

There may be a theology without the Scriptures — a theology of nature, gathered by painful, and slow, and sometimes doubtful processes from what man sees around him in external nature and the course of history, and what he sees within him of nature and of grace. In like manner there may be and has been an astronomy of nature, gathered by man in his natural state without help from aught but his naked eyes, as he watched in the fields by night. But what is this astronomy of nature to the astronomy that has become possible through the wonderful appliances of our observatories? The Word of God is to theology as, but vastly more than, these instruments are to astronomy. It is the instrument which so far increases the possibilities of the science as to revolutionize it and to place it upon a height from which it can never more descend. What would be thought of the deluded man, who, discarding the new methods of research, should insist on acquiring all the astronomy which he would admit, from the unaided observation of his own myopic and astigmatic eyes? Much more deluded is he who, neglecting the instrument of God’s Word written, would confine his admissions of theological truth to what he could discover from the broken lights that play upon external nature, and the faint gleams of a dying or even a slowly reviving light, which arise in his own sinful soul. Ah, no! The telescope first made a real science of astronomy possible: and the Scriptures form the only sufficing source of theology.

The Vice President’s Residence is at the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue, a few blocks from the White House. Technicians at the Control Center of the Technical Service were surprised to see alarms going off at the house. First carbon monoxide, then heat alarms, then other alarms. Even the radiation alarm! Something was seriously amiss. SAs and UD officers immediately responded, letting themselves in. They found Vice President Al Gore standing on a chair, pulling an alarm out of the ceiling, looking for hidden cameras and listening devices.

The biggest surprise that I had during my time in high altitude astronomy was being prevented from arranging a free Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) onsite evaluation to assist with bringing the observatory into OSHA compliance by the upper management team that I reported to.

I saw a guy faint at the W. M. Keck Observatory, he stepped out from the tour group and said to me "I'm feeling sick" and then his eyes rolled back and his knees gave way! The group caught him on his way to the ground and he got free emergency medical oxygen for half an hour before being evacuated off the summit by his tour group!!! His friends stated that he was considered the healthiest person in the group while he was gasping for breaths of life on the summit of Mauna Kea! Never saw him again.

When I was instructed to use medical oxygen to do my job at the W. M. Keck Observatory from 2001 to 2006, I was never told about the legal health information that is now posted on oxygen cylinders. My memories of the green medical oxygen cylinders that we would use daily is that they had no information on them and we were never given a recognised legal oxygen administration training course for routine daily use or a medical prescription from a doctor. We were shown the three oxygen cylinders at the facility and told to use them whenever we developed headaches, which was multiple times daily. It was common to find all three oxygen cylinders in use by other very high altitude workers and to have to line up to get a turn on the magical medical gas.

When I worked in high altitude astronomy, the worst sickness that I experienced was not at the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea Observatory (MKO) in Hawaii, it was at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in Arizona at the much lower altitude of 6,875 feet. Due to my very high altitude experiences, I knew that this strange sickness was not primarily caused by altitude sickness and was most likely Sick Building Syndrome (SBS). After reporting various behavioral problems in all of the staff to the management team, my contract was not renewed, I was unable to legally protect the health and safety of the workers that I was responsible for, troubleshooting of this environmental problem stopped and I left in a sickened state for my next position before I could find the root cause.

When I worked in astronomy, I routinely observed young college and university students working with liquid nitrogen and breathing nitrogen gas as they discharged it into the indoor environment at high altitude.

At the W.M. Keck Observatory on the very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, there was no routine monitoring of mental functioning, blood oxygen levels, blood pressure or heart rate of workers.

Snow cleaning of the world's largest telescope mirrors was an impressive sight. The optics technicians would climb into a huge telescopic boom lift and spray immense clouds of cold carbon dioxide snow and gas onto the ten meter diameter mirrors high above the floor indoors. It would cause some of the accumulated dirt to magically fall off, leaving it less dirty.

Very high altitude observatories are a known worker health hazard.

When the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) found out that Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were going to visit the site to assist in bringing it into legal compliance, they freaked out! They insisted that the visit had to be canceled and the result was that I eventually became so sick from the toxic workplace environment that I had no option but to leave.

There is a lot of willful incompetence in high altitude astronomy that is in the process of coming to light.

I was the manager of the world's largest telescopes.

I suspect COVID-19 hypoxia research will bring about the closure of the biologically toxic Mauna Kea Observatories.

There appears to be a higher death rate in the workplace and outside of the workplace in professional astronomy summit workers.

Professional astronomy summit staff are known to die in accidents.

The biological science went against high altitude professional astronomy over a century ago.

You need attitude to research altitude!

In the end, though he learned how to run an observatory, he fell in love with a different pursuit, the idea of applying the mathematical tools of astronomy to social data.

The government of Hawaii has been arresting the native Hawaiians that are objecting to the development of Mauna Kea. The Hawaiians regard it as the most sacred place in Hawaii. They view the summit of Mauna Kea as their place of worship and they regard the Mauna Kea Observatories as desecration. Could you imagine several of the world’s largest telescopes being built at the Vatican in the middle of St. Peter’s Square? It is the same thing!

It is time to end the willful incompetence regarding altitude sickness and shift work disorder in professional astronomy.

The need to use oxygen to offset ‘Summit Brain’ was never discussed during my job interview. Using oxygen daily came as a nasty surprise once I started working at the Mauna Kea Observatories.

Summit Brain’ was a term that Mauna Kea Observatory management teams would use to describe the forgetfulness and confusion that would develop in their workers when at very high altitudes.

Newton grew impatient. It was clear to him now that any hope of settling the longitude matter lay in the stars. The lunar distance method that had been proposed several times over preceding centuries gained credence and adherents as the science of astronomy improved. Thanks to Newton’s own efforts in formulating the Universal Law of Gravitation, the moon’s motion was better understood and to some extent predictable. Yet the world was still waiting on Flamsteed to finish surveying the stars. Flamsteed, meticulous to a fault, had spent forty years mapping the heavens—and had still not released his data. He kept it all under seal at Greenwich. Newton and Halley managed to get hold of most of Flamsteed’s records from the Royal Observatory, and published their own pirated edition of his star catalog in 1712. Flamsteed retaliated by collecting three hundred of the four hundred printed copies, and burning them.

In 1897, the American astronomer George Ellery Hale succeeded in building a 40- inch wide telescope atop a mountain at Yerkes Observatory, the largest

A nice piece of one-upmanship is to festoon your bins with rings – bird rings that is, not diamond rings or earrings (I think that would be considered dude). The rings are supposed to have come from corpses of rare birds found along the tide line, but if necessary, you can nick them from bird observatory ringing rooms – but you really shouldn’t.

I was hallucinating without the ‘Mad Honey’ atop 13,800 feet Mauna Kea!

Maybe she’d lost her mind for assuming something real could come from a fake relationship, but last night had felt real. Standing on the observatory and baring her soul to Darcy, Elle felt seen in a way she never had before. Like there was something inside her that Darcy recognized.

How was Vancouver?” She wrapped her hand around Darcy’s wrist and tugged her across the room, stopping when they reached the couch. She took a seat, tucking her legs under her. “Come on, spill.” Darcy joined her, leaning back and crossing her legs demurely at the ankle. “Beautiful. We had a lot of fun exploring. Elle wanted to go see the H. R. MacMillan Space Centre, which is an astronomy museum. They have an observatory and”—she chuckled—“the Cosmic Courtyard. They do live demonstrations and you can touch one of the only five touchable moon rocks on the planet. It’s mostly for kids, field trips, that sort of thing, but you should’ve seen Elle’s face.” Darcy should’ve seen her own face. When she talked about Elle, her eyes turned soft and her mouth curled fondly, her voice taking on this incredibly sweet tone Annie had never heard from her before. She shoved Darcy lightly. “You’re in love.” “Yeah, yeah.” Darcy reached inside her pocket and withdrew her phone. She swiped at the screen and turned it toward Annie. “They had a photo op. Elle made me.” On the screen was a picture of Elle and Darcy with their faces poking through the helmets of two astronaut suits. Annie chortled. “Looks like you had a good time.” Darcy tucked her phone away and nodded.

At Chichen Itza in Mexico stand the ruins of a gigantic observatory that the Maya built, whose passageways are aligned with the sun, moon and stars. With this, and in conjunction with other aligned observatories, the Maya were able to predict lunar and solar eclipses with great accuracy as well as measuring the synodic cycle of Venus with a precision that has only been matched and realised in modern times.8

I was considering going to work at one of the highest observatories in the world before I left professional astronomy.

Astronomical observatories are at high altitude due to the radiation levels from Space being elevated because they are in a partial vacuum, the humidity is low and they are often above the clouds.

Is there competition between different observatories? A large and ambitious astronomical research project today would use large amounts of time on a whole range of different telescopes on the ground and in space. These telescopes, far from competing with one another, provide different and complementary views of astronomical sources that greatly increase our ability to understand the physical processes that create them. It is usually a case of "the whole being greater than the sum of the parts". Hubble plays an absolutely pivotal role in many of these programmes.

Theremon was experienced enough in worldly things to understand that no amount of smooth talk was persuasive enough to break through barriers that were so determinedly maintained. He had long ago decided that no worthwhile woman could ever be seduced; you could present the possibility to them, but you had to leave it ultimately to them to do the seducing for you, and if they weren’t so minded, there was very little you could do to change their outlook. And with Siferra, things had been sliding in the wrong direction for him all year long. She had turned on him ferociously—and with some justification, he thought ruefully—once he began his misguided campaign of mockery against Athor and the Observatory group

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 cycles. This

In science we study the limitations of perception about sounds and colors and rest of the observable forces. There are non observable forces too available in physical sciences. Dark matter, black holes are few of those kinds. While we observe sun by naked eye it seems yellow, prism says it is mixture of all colors and non colors, telescopes and observatory says it is white, so what's the real color of sun? It is frequency that deviates and deceives us and so for sounds with limitations in decimals and so for atomic thoery and music theory and even fine arts. what do they really mean? what non observable and unidentified forces available in physics and un discovered elements in chemistry, undiscovered species in biology, undiscovered deciphers of akashic records or undiscovered mathematics. Machine perception will never fully showcase what is it indeed! AI fails, human perception fails. Now another example snakes don't see like how we see. they have infrared perception not like humans. same with other animals, plants and all non living things on universe and beyond. Nobody can understand universe and beyond by narrower perception by available data from earth and machines. So what do i propose i keep on observing on every aspects of observable and non observable forces, entities, living and non living things on universe and beyond with naked eyes and perceptions that doesn't have any colors or any observable or non observable limitations. I am not .............................. and nothing. Thank you

Halley had become England’s second astronomer royal in 1720, after John Flamsteed’s death. The puritanical Flamsteed had reason to roll over in his grave at this development, since in life he had denounced Halley for drinking brandy and swearing “like a sea-captain.” And of course Flamsteed never forgave Halley, or his accomplice Newton, for pilfering the star catalogs and publishing them against his will. Well liked by most, kind to his inferiors, Halley ran the observatory with a sense of humor. He added immeasurably to the luster of the place with his observations of the moon and his discovery of the proper motion of the stars—even if it’s true what they say about the night he and Peter the Great cavorted like a couple of schoolboys and took turns pushing each other through hedges in a wheelbarrow.

The maintenance was worth every penny. When Woolworth built his tower he would have been content if it had only paid for itself in advertising, but the observatory fooled him. Visitors paying 50 cents apiece to view the metropolitan panorama from the top contributed over $125,000 a year for seventeen years. The Woolworth Building attracted over five hundred visitors a day, the Statue of Liberty attracted more than a thousand, but the Empire State observatories outshone them all. The Empire State Building quickly became the sight-seeing goal of New York’s millions of visitors. It was to New York what the Eiffel Tower was to Paris.

Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory,

In what may be the most fascinating element of the book, Hynek talked at length about how teaching astronomy at Northwestern had given him new insights into the UFO enigma: There is a certain disenchantment with science in general among people. This doesn’t extend to astronomy . . . In so many new ways astronomy continues to capture and expand people’s imaginations, particularly the imaginations of young people . . . I know that particularly the kids are intrigued by two series of things these days: From the questions we get at the observatory and in the high schools I talk to, and in freshman classes, the main question areas are the black holes, quasars, and pulsars, and UFOs, bunched together. That is what grabs them. And so, to that extent, both astronomy and UFOs are expanding imagination and consciousness.11