"Ecliptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Twenties, you have to understand the unusual orbit that Anvhar tracks around its sun, 70 Ophiuchi. There are other planets in this system, all of them more or less conforming to the plane of the ecliptic. Anvhar is obviously a rogue, perhaps a captured planet of another sun. For the greatest part of its 780-day year it arcs far out from its primary, in a high-angled sweeping cometary orbit. When it returns there is a brief, hot summer of approximately eighty days before ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... aerolite[obs3], meteor; planetary ring; falling star, shooting star; meteorite, uranolite[obs3]. constellation, zodiac, signs of the zodiac, Charles's wain, Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Great Bear, Southern Cross, Orion's belt, Cassiopea's chair, Pleiades. colures[obs3], equator, ecliptic, orbit. [Science of heavenly bodies] astronomy; uranography, uranology[obs3]; cosmology, cosmography[obs3], cosmogony; eidouranion[obs3], orrery; geodesy &c. (measurement) 466; star gazing, star gazer[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... cosmical causes, and Croll's theory of the increase of the eccentricity of the earth's orbit was widely received among them. Belt, on the other hand, held that the cold was due to an increase in the obliquity of the ecliptic. But these astronomical explanations have not met with much acceptance by physicists; and so chemists have been turned to by some geologists for support of the hypothesis of the variation in the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, or of other alterations in the atmosphere, while others have gone ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... truths which no succeeding age has repudiated. They determined the circumference of the earth by a method identical with that which would be employed by modern astronomers. They ascertained the position of the stars by right ascension and declination. They knew the obliquity of the ecliptic, and determined the place of the sun's apogee as well as its mean motion. Their calculations on the eccentricity of the moon prove that they had a rectilinear trigonometry and tables of chords. They had an approximate knowledge of parallax. [Footnote: ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... smoke drove away certain noxious dragons which at this time, excited by the summer heat, copulated in the air and poisoned the wells and rivers by dropping their seed into them; and he explains the custom of trundling a wheel to mean that the sun, having now reached the highest point in the ecliptic, begins ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... their axes, and the satellites, with one exception, revolve about their primaries, and, so far as is known, rotate upon their axes in the same direction, from west to east, and the motions take place very nearly in the same plane—the ecliptic. This seems to point to the conclusion that these motions have a common origin, as would be the case if all these bodies at one time existed as a single mass which revolved in the same direction. The one exception is to be found in the satellites of Uranus, whose motion is retrograde. ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... than she now occupies; and that this was the only object of her existence. As this was not done he argued that her waxing and waning light was a proof that she was not located by an Omniscient Creator. He says he would have placed her in the beginning in opposition to the sun, in the plane of the ecliptic, and about four times her present distance from us, with such a motion as would ever maintain that position, thus securing full moon from sunset to sunrise, without possibility of eclipse. But Lionville demonstrates that "if the moon had occupied at the beginning the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... human figure; but when we remember the symbolic meaning of the cup, that seems to be an obvious explanation of the name Virgo, which the constellation has borne since the earliest times. (The three stars [gr b], [gr g] and [gr a], lie very nearly on the Ecliptic, that is, the Sun's path—a fact to ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... bodies are very peculiar in respect to the orbits they move in. This peculiarity is sometimes in the eccentricity of their orbits, sometimes in the manner in which their orbits are tilted to the general plane of the ecliptic, in which all the ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... southern extremity communicates with the Royal Banqueting Room, sixty feet in length, by forty-two in breadth: the walls are bounded at the height of twenty-three feet by a cornice, apparently inlaid with pearls and gold, from which spring four ecliptic arches, supported by golden columns, surmounted with a dome, rising to a height of forty-five feet, and constructed to represent an eastern sky; beneath which is seen spreading the broad umbrageous foliage ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... the Modern and Classical periods, but there was an earlier astronomy, not inconsiderable in amount, of which no history is preserved. For when Eudoxus commenced his labours, the length of the year had already been determined, the equinoxes and solstices had been recognized, the ecliptic, the celestial equator, and the poles of both great circles were known, and the five principal planets were familiar objects. This Early astronomy must have had its history, its stages of development, but we can only with difficulty trace ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... having no capital, the design failed, though I was complimented thereupon by the 'Institute for Harmonizing the Universes,' and elected a contributing member of that society. For several years I petitioned annually for outfit and transportation to Scilly Islands,[2] on the Ecliptic Circle, where I purposed to develop my scheme of transferring a portion of our globe to the system of Orion. In this I was opposed by the Palaeontologic Society, on the ground that some valuable fossils were presumed to be there; ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... own story without plagiarism. As to Truth being stranger than Fiction, that is all nonsense; it is a proverb set about by Nature to conceal her own want of originality. I am not like that pessimist philosopher who assumed her malignity from the fact of the obliquity of the ecliptic; but the truth is, Nature is a pirate. She has not hesitated to plagiarise from even so humble an individual as myself. Years after I had placed my wicked baronet in his living tomb, she starved to death a hunter in Mexico under ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... Owl. 'But the sun is rather unreliable, after all. He has the Ecliptic to go round, and the whole of the Solar System to attend to, and one must make allowances for him. But, for purposes of strict chronology, watches are better, especially these watches! They wind themselves up punctually every night, and if their owners break the mainsprings ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... of any such aberrational ellipse is always parallel to AC, i.e. the ecliptic, and since it is equal to the ratio of the velocity of light to the velocity of the earth, it is necessarily constant. This constant length subtends an angle of about 40" at the earth; the "constant of aberration'' is half this angle. The generally accepted value ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... If P be the position of the bead, the angles, P H H, P E E, will give the height of the sun above the horizon at noon, at the two solstices. Between these angles there should exist an angle of 47 deg., double the obliquity of the ecliptic, that is to say, the excursion of the sun in declination: now P E E-P H H E P ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... its course around the heavens, seems to have been first ascertained by astronomers whose names are unknown. The skill of the early Oriental geometers was further evidenced by their determination of the position of the ecliptic with regard to the celestial equator, and by their success in the measurement of the angle between these two important ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... the poles—not only on this earth but in the solar, alcyonic, and manasic globes. The equatorial belt, where phenomena are richest in the manasic globes, we call the Milky Way; in the solar globe we call it the plane of the ecliptic; and on the earth, the tropics. Modern science has not yet found it in Alcyonic globe—because it has never ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... task of observation is undoubted, it will be found that Ptolemy is very nearly right in ascribing the latitude of 16.26 to the city Meroe.[Ptolem. l.4,c.8.] Pliny [Plin. Hist. Nat. l.2,c.73.] is equally correct in stating that the two points of the ecliptic, in which the sun is in the zenith at Meroe, are the 18th degree of Taurus, and the 14th degree of Leo. The 5000 stades which Strabo[Strabo, p. 113.] and Pliny [Plin. ibid.] We learn from another passage in Pliny, ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... Babylonians in mathematics and astronomy were far beyond those of the Egyptians. They divided the year into twelve months, and arrived at the signs of the ecliptic or zodiac. The week they fixed at seven days by the course of the moon. They divided the day into twelve hours, and the hour into sixty minutes. They invented weights and measures, the knowledge of which went from them to the other Asiatic nations. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... privately not altogether virtuous. The sun, in fact, according to astrologers, is the natural significator of respectability; for which I can discover no reason, unless it be that the sun travelling always in the ecliptic has no latitude, and so solar folk are allowed none. When the sun is ill aspected, the native is both proud and mean, tyrannical and sycophantic, exceedingly unamiable, and generally disliked because of his arrogance and ignorant pomposity. The persons ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... individuals, however, deposited their Dollars in a stronghold called a bank. These banks invested the Dollars in loans and commercial enterprises, with the result that, every time the earth traversed the solar ecliptic, the banks compelled each borrower to repay, or to acknowledge as due, the original loan, plus six one-hundredths of that loan. And to the depositor, the banks paid three one-hundredths of the deposited Dollars for ...
— John Jones's Dollar • Harry Stephen Keeler
... earth, too, haply, like a dust-mote, Was set whirling her assigned sure way, Round this little orb of her ecliptic To some harmony ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... equinox, the season of Dante's journey, the sun in Aries is at the intersection of the ecliptic and the equator of the celestial sphere, and his apparent motion in his annual revolution cuts the apparent diurnal motion of the fixed stars, which is performed in circles ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... it is the law of nature— do not brooks run into rivers—rivers into seas—mountains crumble down upon the plains?—are not the seasons contented to equalise the parts of the earth? Why does the sun run round the ecliptic, instead of the equator, but to give an equal share of his heat to both sides of the world? Are we not all equally born in misery? does not death level us all aequo pede, as the poet hath? are we not all equally hungry, thirsty, and sleepy, and thus levelled by our natural wants? ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... girdle or belt in the celestial sphere, which extends about eight degrees on each side of the Ecliptic. It is divided into twelve portions, called the signs of the Zodiac, within which all the planets make their revolutions. The Zodiac is so called from the animals represented upon it, and is supposed to have originated ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... subordinates are trained to become superiors, in time. Patrolman Willis set a time-switch and pushed the overdrive button. The squad ship hopped, and abruptly the local sun had a perceptible disk. Willis made the usual tests for direction of rotation, to get the ecliptic plane. He began to search for planets. As he found them, he checked with the reference data. All this was tedious. ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... variation from the regular curve disturbs the air currents. Moreover, the motions of the earth are very complicated. Sometimes it is nearer the sun than at other times. It wobbles slightly on its axis. It is inclined to the plane of the ecliptic, causing the seasons, and that brings a new set of factors into the problem. A mountain range or a desert will modify the atmosphere, even the difference between a forest and ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler |
