The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.
Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.
There's the Hollywood sign; there's Griffith Observatory; there's the great, amazing Los Angeles Basin. It's 465 square miles of insanity and the best food on the planet.
In October, 1865, occurred what was, in my eyes, the greatest event in the history of the observatory. The new transit circle arrived from Berlin in its boxes.
The result was that, if it happened to clear off after a cloudy evening, I frequently arose from my bed at any hour of the night or morning and walked two miles to the observatory to make some observation included in the programme.
[soldiers observe the blast from the observatory] Col. Muska: The fire of Heaven that destroyed Sodom and Gamorrah in the Old Testament. The Ramanayah referred to it as "Indra's Arrow." The entire world will once again kneel before the power of Laput...
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.
After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain.
As I was leaving graduate school in 1974, I was recruited to join a fledgling SETI project at the Hat Creek Observatory in California, mainly because I knew how to program an ancient PDP8/S computer that had been donated to the project.
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.
If you start out with a little telescope observing the stars and you keep at it over the years, as I have, it's kind of a dream to one day have an observatory where you can always go and use the telescope conveniently.
The 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 d...
General: [when soldiers have gathered in observatory room on Laputa; Muska appears before them as a hologram] General: What's going on? Col. Muska: Hold your tongue, commoner! You are in the presence of the king of Laputa. General: The man has gone *...
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...
Monk: [At the observatory] Are you Monsieur Gustave of the Grand Budapest Hotel in Nebelsbad? M. Gustave: Uh-huh. Monk: Get on the next cable car. Monk: [On the cable car] Are you Monsieur Gustave of the Grand Budapest Hotel in Nebelsbad? M. Gustave:...
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 ...
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 Bene...
