"Sidereal" Quotes from Famous Books
... less confusion. All the matter is given by months, as in the solar and lunar ephemeris of our own and the British Almanac. For the sun we have its longitude, right ascension, and declination, all expressed in arc and not in time. The equation of time and the sidereal time of mean noon complete the ephemeris proper. The positions of the principal planets are given in no case oftener than for every third day. The longitude and latitude of the moon are given for noon and midnight. ... — Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... regarded as demonstrated truth, or as receiving the smallest support from any observed numerical relations which actually hold good among the elements of the primary orbits, I beg leave to demur. Assuredly it receives no support from the observation of the effects of sidereal aggregation as exemplified in the formation of globular and elliptic clusters, supposing them to have resulted from such aggregation. For we see this cause working out in thousands of instances, to have resulted, ... — Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... recorded, in order to see if they move. Herschel detected the motion of fifty of these systems, and revolutionized modern astronomy. Astronomers soared away from the little solar system, and began a minute search throughout the whole sidereal heavens. Herschel's catalogue contained four hundred double suns, only fifty of which were known to be in revolution. Since then, enormous advance has been made. The micrometer has been improved into an instrument of great delicacy, and the number ... — Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... James Harkner Wallis of the Lick Observatory will lecture in the auditorium, at eight o'clock, upon "Theories of the Sidereal System." ... — When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... excited his attention. Further, he had entered upon the experiments which ultimately showed that the Sun positively moves; that in this, as in other respects, the magnificent orb of day must be ranged among the stars; that the apparently inextricable irregularities of numerous sidereal proper motions arise in great part from the displacement of the Solar System; that, in short, the point of space toward which Earth and its sister planets are annually advancing, is situated ... — The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... these, could not fail to encourage the natural tendency of my mind toward a generalization of views, and to encourage me to attempt, in a special work, to treat of the knowledge which we at present possess, regarding the sidereal and terrestrial phenomena of the Cosmos in their empirical relations. The hitherto undefined idea of a physical geography has thus, by an extended and perhaps too boldly imagined a plan, been comprehended under the idea ... — COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... to place Italy, Spain, Japan among the wonder regions of the world; but nature placed California there without assistance from anybody. I do not refer alone to the scenery of California which is duplicated in no other spot of the sidereal system; nor to the climate which matches it; nor to its super-mundane fertility, nor to its super-solar fecundity. The railroad folder with its voluble vocabulary has already beaten me to it. I do not refer solely to that rich yellow-and-violet, springtime bourgeoning which turns California ... — The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... sailing in a sea of milk. At first sight the ocean seemed lactified. Was it the effect of the lunar rays? No; for the moon, scarcely two days old, was still lying hidden under the horizon in the rays of the sun. The whole sky, though lit by the sidereal rays, seemed black by contrast with the ... — Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... constellations, the famous question of Carlyle (by which he derides the littleness of human affairs upon the scale of the measure of the heavens,) "What thinks Bootes as he drives his hunting dogs up the zenith in their leash of sidereal fire?" will force itself on his notice. What, indeed, will Bootes think of this new constellation? Besides, reaching this space beyond the power of Congress ever to send for persons and papers, how shall he return, and how decide in the contest there become personal and ... — History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... end has been before the Senate for some two years, but as no action has been taken I contemplate negotiating a new convention for a joint determination of the meridian by telegraphic observations. These, it is believed, will give more accurate and unquestionable results than the sidereal methods heretofore independently followed, which, as is known, proved discrepant at several points on the line, although not varying at any ... — Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... Excellencies—above all, of those dark and hideous mysteries which lie in the outer regions of the moon—regions which, owing to the almost miraculous accordance of the satellite's rotation on its own axis with its sidereal revolution about the earth, have never yet been turned, and, by God's mercy, never shall be turned, to the scrutiny of the telescopes of man. All this, and more—much more—would I most willingly detail. But, to be brief, I must ... — The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... world, observe, is not the earth, as Addison understood it, but the entire sidereal universe, depicted not as the infinity we now know it to be, but as a definite object, so insulated in the vastness of space as to be perceptible to the distant Fiend as a minute star, and no larger in comparison with the courts of Heaven—themselves not wholly seen—than such a twinkler ... — Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... moon moves on an epicycle centred on a second epicycle, itself centred on a deferent, excentric to the earth. The earth's axis rotates about the pole of the ecliptic, making one revolution and a twenty-six thousandth part of a revolution in the sidereal year, in the opposite direction to ... — History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... statesmen—of whose renown she had been a humble and distant beholder, and who now, as a part of the habitual furniture of London drawing rooms, struck her as stars fallen from the firmament and become palpable—revealing also sometimes, on contact, qualities not to have been predicted of sidereal bodies. Bessie, who knew so many of her contemporaries by reputation, had a good many personal disappointments; but, on the other hand, she had innumerable satisfactions and enthusiasms, and she communicated the emotions of either class ... — An International Episode • Henry James
... ear, and, for these purposes, it may be very useful; but it supplies nothing to the mind. The ideas of Christian theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestick for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures, is to magnify, by a concave mirror, the sidereal hemisphere. ... — Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... countless circling suns and planets cannot be said to have cost an omnipotent God more trouble, so to speak, than a universe a million times smaller. The prodigality of the Creator reveals His endless resources; if the vision of sidereal abysses and flaming globes intimidates me and makes me cynical about my unimportance, is it not because I have lost the high consciousness of a spiritual being and forgotten the unplumbed chasms which separate ... — The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... the morning star was in the sky, splendid, eloquent, charged with a subtle message expressed in no other sidereal scintillation, heralding not only the dawn, but palpitant with the prophecy and the assurance of eternal day. There was a sense of light about the eastern mountains, albeit so heavily looming. And suddenly, ... — The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... grots along a zone, And now he passes yonder blazing throne, O'er diamond pavements, passes shining seats Whereon the high and holy conclave meets To rule the empires vast that spread away To utmost bounds in all their vast array. Around the whole expanse grand cestes spread O'er paths sidereal unending lead. As circling wheels within a wheel they shine, Enveloping the Fields with light divine. A noontide glorious of shining stars, Where humming music rings from myriad cars, Where pinioned multitudes their harps may tune, And in their holy ... — Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... Such facts as these make it probable that the career of other stars, when adequately inquired into, would be found to be like that of our own sun. Observation daily enhances this probability, for our study of the sidereal universe is continually showing us stars in all stages of development. We find irregular nebulae, for example; we find spiral and spheroidal nebulae; we find stars which have got beyond the nebulous stage, but are still at a whiter ... — The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... woman are worth being repeated in such countless worlds. There may be souls in other stars, but I doubt their having any bodies attached to them. But come, Mrs Bold, let us put our bonnets on and walk round the close. If we are to discuss sidereal questions, we shall do so much better under the towers of the cathedral, than stuck ... — Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the rise of the Dog-star, which led these people to imagine that they stood in the relation of effect and cause, and from these simple data began the study of astronomy. The Egyptians, by the study of the movement of the stars, were enabled to determine the length of the sidereal year, which they divided into twelve months, of thirty days each, adding five days to complete the year. This is the calendar which was {183} introduced from Egypt into the Roman Empire by Julius Caesar. It was revised by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, and ... — History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... felt the ancient swaying Of the earth before the sun, On the darkened marge of midnight heard sidereal rivers playing; Rash it was to bathe our souls there, but we plunged and all was done. That is lives and lives behind us—lo, our journey ... — Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... Coffee-house in rather earnest talk, "it is a true sublimity to dwell here. These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smoke and thousandfold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night, what thinks Booetes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over the Zenith in their leash of sidereal fire? That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to Halls roofed-in, and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and ... — Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... have revolved upon his axis, and to have been surrounded with an atmosphere expanded by intense heat, and extending far beyond the limits of our system as it now exists. This solar atmosphere revolved, like the sun itself, around its axis; but its heat, constantly radiated into sidereal space, gradually diminished, and the atmosphere being contracted in proportion as it cooled, the rapidity of its rotation was accelerated, until it reached the point at which the central attraction was overcome by the centrifugal force, and then a zone of vapor would ... — Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... to be used in the year 1831; and that I reduced completely the observed occultations (with a small error, subsequently corrected). In 1831 the system of correction of broken transits was improved: the errors of assumed R.A. of Fundamental Stars were exhibited: Mean Solar Time was obtained from Sidereal Time by time of Transit of [Symbol: Aries] (computed by myself): the method of computing occultations was improved. In 1832 the small Equatoreal was erected, and was soon employed in observations of the elongation of the ... — Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... place, and opened the full view of the heavens. If God is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds innumerable. Yes! one might well have divined what reason now demonstrated, indicating those endless [151] spaces which a real sidereal ... — Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... quaint, pleasant, pretty old town! Has it been asleep these hundreds and hundreds of years, and is the brisk young Prince of the Sidereal Realms in his screaming car drawn by his snorting steel elephant coming to waken it? Time was when there must have been life and bustle and commerce here. Those vast, venerable walls were not made to keep out cows, but men-at-arms, led by fierce captains, who prowled about the gates, and robbed ... — Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... man was up once more. "I rise to object. There isn't any such place. The com—commanding general'll put him in irons for misrepresenting the sidereal system. There's only heaven, hell, and the enemy.—Yaaaaih, Yaai.... Yaaai, yaaaah, yaaaaih! Certainly, sergeant. The pleasure is mine, sir. Don't mention it, I beg. Mum's ... — The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... closely nestled atoms is a planetary space, a stupendous gulf when compared with the little spheres between which it flows." Thus we may think of the entire universe as a living organism, like a ripening orange, its component atoms worlds, the sidereal movements its vital circulation. ... — The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the realms sidereal, Clothed with the immaterial, Far as the fields elysian In starry bloom extend, The stretch of angel vision Can see ... — Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... interest of their sidereal observations led them on, till the knowledge that scarce any other human vision was travelling within a hundred million miles of their own gave them such a sense of the isolation of that faculty as almost to be a sense of isolation in respect of their whole personality, causing ... — Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... writers and observers. In this compact treatise he discourses familiarly but most accurately and entertainingly of the Sun as the source of light, of heat, and of chemical action; of its influence upon living beings; of its place in the Planetary World; of its place in the Sidereal World; of its physical and chemical constitution; of the maintenance of Solar Radiation, and, in conclusion, the question whether the Sun is inhabited, is examined. The work embraces the results of the most recent ... — The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier |