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Precession   /prisˈɛʃən/   Listen
noun
Precession  n.  The act of going before, or forward.
Lunisolar precession. (Astron.) See under Lunisolar.
Planetary precession, that part of the precession of the equinoxes which depends on the action of the planets alone.
Precession of the equinoxes (Astron.), the slow backward motion of the equinoctial points along the ecliptic, at the rate of 50.2" annually, caused by the action of the sun, moon, and planets, upon the protuberant matter about the earth's equator, in connection with its diurnal rotation; so called because either equinox, owing to its westerly motion, comes to the meridian sooner each day than the point it would have occupied without the motion of precession, and thus precedes that point continually with reference to the time of transit and motion.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Precession" Quotes from Famous Books



... aggression, and to avert the outbreak of a devastating war to which he saw Europe doomed. It may be wearisome to read the record. Yet it is the chronicle of Christendom during one of the most important and fateful epochs of modern history. No man can thoroughly understand the complication and precession of phenomena attending the disastrous dawn of the renewed war, on an even more awful scale than the original conflict in the Netherlands, without studying the correspondence of Barneveld. The history of Europe is there. The fate of Christendom is there. The conflict of elements, the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... planet itself through geological periods which antedated the advent of man, or with more recent events, current narrations of which have been distorted by careless or perverse historians. The memory of Nature is infallibly accurate and inexhaustibly minute. A time will come as certainly as the precession of the equinoxes, when the literary method of historical research will be laid aside as out of date, in the case of all original work. People among us who are capable of exercising astral clairvoyance in full perfection—but have not yet been called away to higher functions ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... vacation at the seaside, while they were undergraduates of Cambridge University. They had spent all their time, to the surprise of onlookers, in spinning rounded stones on the beach, their object being to obtain a practical solution of the mathematical problem of "precession." ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss

... a decrease, so that after the lapse of becoming periods the original state of things is restored. Such periodic phenomena abound in astronomy. There is the annual fluctuation of the seasons; there is the eighteen or nineteen year period of the moon; there is the great period of the precession of the equinoxes, amounting to twenty-six thousand years; and then there is the stupendous Annus Magnus of hundreds of thousands of years, during which the earth's orbit itself breathes in and out in response to the attraction of the planets. ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball

... behind him ample evidence of his genius 'as a mathematician, an observer, and a theorist.' We are indebted to him for the earliest star catalogue, in which he included 1,081 stars. He discovered the Precession of the Equinoxes, and determined the motions of the Sun and Moon, and also the length of the year, with greater precision than any of his predecessors. He invented the sciences of plane and spherical trigonometry, and was the first to ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... years after Aristotle, calculated the length of the year to within six minutes, discovered the precession of equinoxes and counted all the stars he could see, making a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard



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