The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “astronomy”

Astronomy as Existential Calibration: A Poetic Manifesto for Science from Two Centuries Before the Golden Age of Space Telescopes
Astronomy as Existential Calibration: A Poetic Manifesto for Science from Two Centuries Before the Golden Age of Space Telescopes

“Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost.”

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Funeral March for the First Cosmonaut: Artist, Poet, and Philosopher Etel Adnan’s Stunning Painted Poem About Life, Death, Loneliness, and Our Cosmic Redemption
Funeral March for the First Cosmonaut: Artist, Poet, and Philosopher Etel Adnan’s Stunning Painted Poem About Life, Death, Loneliness, and Our Cosmic Redemption

“In the beginning was the white page. In the beginning was the Sufi in orbit… In the beginning was color. In the beginning was music.”

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Citizen Science, the Cosmos, and the Meaning of Life: How the Comet That Might One Day Destroy Us Gives Us the Most Transcendent Celestial Spectacle
Citizen Science, the Cosmos, and the Meaning of Life: How the Comet That Might One Day Destroy Us Gives Us the Most Transcendent Celestial Spectacle

Encounters with the beautiful and the sublime in the science of “the single most dangerous object known to humanity.”

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Maria Mitchell’s Telescope and the Kickstarting of Popular Astronomy: The Heartening Story of the World’s First Crowdfunding Campaign for Science
Maria Mitchell’s Telescope and the Kickstarting of Popular Astronomy: The Heartening Story of the World’s First Crowdfunding Campaign for Science

“Patient thought, patient labor, and firmness of purpose are almost omnipotent.”

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Trees, Stars, and the Wonder of Being Human: Astronomer Natalie Batalha Reads Dylan Thomas’s Cosmic Serenade to What We Are
Trees, Stars, and the Wonder of Being Human: Astronomer Natalie Batalha Reads Dylan Thomas’s Cosmic Serenade to What We Are

“Children in wonder watching the stars, is the aim and the end.”

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My God, It’s Full of Stars: Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and Our Human Hunger to Know the Universe (Tracy K. Smith Reads Tracy K. Smith)
My God, It’s Full of Stars: Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and Our Human Hunger to Know the Universe (Tracy K. Smith Reads Tracy K. Smith)

“…so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.”

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Probable Impossibilities: Physicist Alan Lightman on Beginnings, Endings, and What Makes Life Worth Living
Probable Impossibilities: Physicist Alan Lightman on Beginnings, Endings, and What Makes Life Worth Living

How our cosmic improbability confers dignity and meaning upon our shared existence.

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Kiss of the Sun: Poetry, Love, and Our Search for Meaning at the End of Time
Kiss of the Sun: Poetry, Love, and Our Search for Meaning at the End of Time

A spare guide to making joyous peace with “the end of time, which is also the end of poetry (and wheat and evil and insects and love).”

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Secrets from the Center of the World: Poet Joy Harjo’s Reflections on Science and Meaning in Response to an Astronomer’s Otherworldly Photographs of Earth
Secrets from the Center of the World: Poet Joy Harjo’s Reflections on Science and Meaning in Response to an Astronomer’s Otherworldly Photographs of Earth

“I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.”

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The Mangrove and the Meaning of Life: Annie Dillard on What Earth’s Most Otherworldly Trees Teach Us About Being Human
The Mangrove and the Meaning of Life: Annie Dillard on What Earth’s Most Otherworldly Trees Teach Us About Being Human

“We don’t know where we belong, but in times of sorrow it doesn’t seem to be here… where space is curved… we’re all going to die, and it seems as wise to stay in bed as budge.”

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