SIDEREAL • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Sidereal

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adjective

Sidereal adj.

Relating to the stars; starry; astral; as, sidereal astronomy.

(Astron.) Measuring by the apparent motion of the stars; designated, marked out, or accompanied, by a return to the same position in respect to the stars; as, the sidereal revolution of a planet; a sidereal day.

Sidereal clock, Sidereal day, Sidereal month, Sidereal year. See under Clock, Day, etc.

Sideral time, time as reckoned by sideral days, or, taking the sidereal day as the unit, the time elapsed since a transit of the vernal equinox, reckoned in parts of a sidereal day. This is, strictly, apparent sidereal time, mean sidereal time being reckoned from the transit, not of the true, but of the mean, equinoctial point.

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Etymology of 'Sidereal'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Sidereal" Quotes from Famous Books

... Brahe on the Danish island of Huen in 1576. In this "City of the Heavens," still dependent solely upon the unaided eye as a collector of starlight, Tycho made those invaluable observations that enabled Kepler to deduce the true laws of planetary motion. But after all these centuries the sidereal world embraced no objects, barring an occasional comet or temporary star, that lay beyond the vision of the earliest astronomers. The conceptions of the stellar universe, except those that ignored the solid ground of observation, were limited by the small aperture of the human ...

— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale

... forests, meet, In rainbow mists circling her brow and feet: The forces vast that sit In session round her; powers paraclete, That guard her presence; awful forms and fair, Making secure her place; Guiding her surely as the worlds through space Do laws sidereal; edicts, thunder-lit, Of skyed eternity, in splendor borne On planetary wings of ...

— Poems • Madison Cawein

... East than in the West? Why is the contrary true of the Atlantic? Why, under the Equator, are they highest in the middle of the sea? Wherefore these deviations in the swell of the ocean? This is what magnetic effluvium, combined with terrestrial rotation and sidereal attraction, ...

— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides ...

— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... Galle: the systematisations attempted by Bode and Kepler of cubes of distances and squares of times of revolution: the almost infinite compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion: the sidereal origin of meteoric stones: the Libyan floods on Mars about the period of the birth of the younger astroscopist: the annual recurrence of meteoric showers about the period of the feast of S. Lawrence (martyr, lo August): the monthly ...

— Ulysses • James Joyce

... good luck to hit on a fine evening. He has his 20-foot Newtonian telescope in the open air, and mounted in his garden very simply and conveniently. It is moved by an assistant, who stands below it.... Near the instrument is a clock regulated to sidereal time.... In the room near it sits Herschel's sister, and she has Flamsteed's atlas open before her. As he gives her the word, she writes down the declination and right ascension, and the other circumstances of the observation. In this way Herschel examines the whole sky without omitting the least ...

— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

Words linked to "Sidereal" : sidereal month, sidereal hour, sidereal day, constellation