"Fixed star" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first and shortest natural division of time. At present we recognize three kinds of "days"—the sidereal day, which is the interval of time between successive passages of a fixed star over a given meridian; the apparent solar day, which is the interval between two passages of the sun's centre over a given meridian, or the interval between two successive noons on a sundial; and the mean solar day, which is the interval between the successive passages of a fictitious sun ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... Light travels this distance in about eight minutes, to be exact, the rate is 186,400 miles per second. To get an idea of the immensity of the distance of the so-called fixed stars, let us take this as a base of comparison. The nearest fixed star to us is Alpha Centauri, which is one of the brightest as seen in the southern heavens. It requires four and one-quarter years for a beam of light to travel from this star to earth at the rate of ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... the cupola Cassiopeia leaned toward the pole, her breast flashing its eternal badge—the star-pointed W. Low in the north—as the country tale went—tied to follow her emotions, externally separate, eternally true to the fixed star of her gaze, the Waggoner tilted his wheels and drove them close and along and above ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "Serial Library," of the excellent translations of Plato, which we esteem one of the chief benefits the cheap press has yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a few more notes of the elevation and bearings of this fixed star; or, to add a bulletin, like the journals, of Plato ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... At every place between us and the sun, we said, there is to be a particular which is to be a member of the sun as it was a few minutes ago. There will also, of course, have to be a particular which is a member of any planet or fixed star that may happen to be visible from that place. At the place where I am, there will be particulars which will be members severally of all the "things" I am now said to be perceiving. Thus throughout the world, everywhere, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... is twenty thousand times that of the sun. Stellar distances can be realized only by familiar comparison. For instance: were it possible for a person to journey to the sun in a single day, basing the calculation upon a corresponding degree of speed, it would require fifty-five years to reach this fixed star! Probably not one-half of those who have sailed beneath its tranquil beauty are aware that near the upper middle of the cross there is a brilliant cluster of stars which, though not visible to the naked eye, are brought into view ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... time decay, Eileen Aroon! Beauty must fade away, Eileen Aroon! Castles are sacked in war, Chieftains are scattered far, Truth is a fixed star,— Eileen Aroon! ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... little southeast of a point where the arc of the orbit of Venus bisects the milky way, and ran due east eighty chains, three links and a swivel, thence south fifteen paces and a half to a blue spot in the sky, thence proceeding west eighty chains, three links of sausage and a half to a fixed star, thence north across the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... orbits—Prof. S. W. Burnham, the distinguished young astronomer of the Dearborn Observatory, Chicago, having discovered eight hundred within the last eight years. This discovery implies stupendous motion; every fixed star is a sun like our own, and we can imagine these wheeling orbs to be surrounded by cool planets, the abode of life, as well as ours. If the orbit of a binary system lies edgewise toward us, then one star will hide the other each ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... lie with my eyes on the stars-pin- hole windows to God's glory. Sometimes I can't sleep—I get so full of worship. I was reading the other day that it would take a fast train forty million years to get to the nearest fixed star. Isn't that awful? And think of it, when you got there, a billion times more would lie beyond—so much more that you wouldn't even then have touched the fringe of the wonderful scheme. It is too big for the ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... the foundation of our intellectual system; the great ideas of time, and space, and extension, and magnitude, and number, and motion, and power. How grand the conception of the ages on ages required for several of the secular equations of the solar system; of distances from which the light of a fixed star would not reach us in twenty millions of years, of magnitudes compared with which the earth is but a foot-ball; of starry hosts—suns like our own—numberless as the sands on the shore; of worlds and systems shooting through the infinite ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... precisely that spot in the heavens which came in the order of the minute observations that I had previously mapped out for myself. Had I not seen it just when I did, I must inevitably have come upon it soon after, since my telescope was so perfect that I was able to distinguish it from a fixed star in the ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... really is there. She never lets him go. It's the most beautiful and dignified sorrow I've ever known. It's so beautiful that it has its compensations, I should think. Its very completeness is a compensation. It gives her a fixed star to steer by. She doesn't drift. We sat there evening after evening in the quiet of that magically haunted room, and watched the sunset burn on the river, and felt him. Felt him with ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... better, which is that of the earth's revolution about the sun. This is found upon experience to save much time and labour, to correct many irregular motions, and is better suited to the respect due from a planet to a fixed star. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... by the said Board, having good health, makes the pomp of empires ridiculous three hundred and sixty-five days every year." Bard Macdonald is a very poor man, yet he has contrived to hitch his waggon on to a fixed star. He lives in one of those low thatch-roofed bothies that, with the accompanying croft, are rented at from L2 to L4 a year. He has a wife and a large family. Yet, tormented as he is by present poverty and past ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... logical parallel to this mode of inference is that of generalising from the one known instance of the earth being inhabited, to the conclusion that "every heavenly body without exception, sun, planet, satellite, comet, fixed star, or nebula, is inhabited, and must be so from the inherent constitution of things." After which the passage continues, "It is true there are cases in which, with acknowledged propriety, we generalise from a single instance to a multitude ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... was one central thought, the fixed star of his mind, round which all the others continually revolved, taking their light and colour from it, and that was the thought of Madeline Croston, the woman to whom he had been engaged. Years and years had passed since he had seen her face, and yet it was always present to ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... applies to Bradley's observation, and to an even higher degree. What Bradley discovered is the fact that the apparent direction in which we see a fixed star is dependent on the direction in which the earth moves relatively to the star, a phenomenon known under the name of 'aberration of light'. This phenomenon is frequently brought to students' understanding by means of the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... positions! Yes; you will understand! One point is the Southern Cross, near the South polar Circle, the second point is the fixed star Antares, and the third is the fixed star Spica, which, together form a perfect triangle, one limb of which passes through a cluster of ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... dispassionate manner, her steady, unwearied prosecution of a purpose, being just the qualities that he most honored; and he worshipped her reverently at a distance, like an old astrologer adoring some particularly bright fixed star. No whisking comets or changing satellites for ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... the phenomena of light. Experimentally, ether waves of all lengths are found to have a velocity of 186,000 miles in a second. It takes about eight minutes to reach us from the sun, four hours from Neptune the most distant planet, and from the nearest fixed star about three and a half years. Astronomers tell us that some visible stars are so distant that their light requires not less than ten thousand years and probably more to reach us, though travelling at the enormous rate of ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... Church-of-Englandism. To the dazzled eyes of all ordinary mortals, content to chew the cud of parish sermons, and swallow, Sunday after Sunday, the articles of common belief, he seemed an eccentric comet. But a better astronomy recognized him as a fixed star, for he was unmistakable by that fitting Few whose verdict is both ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... No fixed star, great or small, in the firmament of literature ever got there without some vital reason, or merely by writing, however remarkable. The idea that literature is a mere matter of writing is seen to be ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... politicks was introduced. JOHNSON. 'Pulteney was as paltry a fellow as could be. He was a Whig, who pretended to be honest; and you know it is ridiculous for a Whig to pretend to be honest. He cannot hold it out.' He called Mr Pitt a meteor; Sir Robert Walpole a fixed star. He said, 'It is wonderful to think that all the force of government was required to prevent Wilkes from being chosen the chief magistrate of London, though the liverymen knew he would rob their shops, knew he would debauch their ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... several places to which men repair according to the manner in which their Jiva-souls escape from their bodies. I shall now tell thee the premonitory indication, as laid down by the wise of those who have but one year to live. One, who having previously seen the fixed star called Arandhati, fails to see it, or that other star called Dhruva,[1660] or one that sees the full Moon or the flame of a burning lamp to be broken towards the south, has but one year to live. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... menial life on board the Good Intent, the weary months of toil, difficulty and danger as Angria's prisoner, were past; and it was with whole-hearted joyousness he realized that he was now on his way to Bombay, where Clive was—Clive, the hero who was as a fixed star in his mental firmament. ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... scrutiny. On the very night on which Leverrier's letter had been received, we find the telescope directed to the designated point in the heavens. A stranger appears, but has only the aspect of a fixed star. Long did the eye watch that night, but no motion was found. When twenty-four hours rolled round, and it was once more possible to fix the instrument upon this strange body, it had moved in the precise degree and direction computed. The new ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... in the white face of his friend and enemy, and almost turned cold at what he saw there. He had seen the blue but gloomy eyes of the western Highlander troubled by as many tempests as his own west Highland seas, but there had always been a fixed star of faith behind the storms. Now the star had gone out, and there ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... had met them at the Canary Islands, and greater still at Honolulu or some spot in Tasmania. Imagine what it would be to meet them in one of the planets; but if the meeting were to take place in the furthest fixed star the delight would be almost too much for us. At that distance, Sidmouth would seem little further from London than ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... the place marked in our map, and presently we shall recognise the one we want by the peculiarity of its light. What is the lowest power which will exhibit Neptune as a disc I do not know, but I am certain no observer can mistake him for a fixed star with a 2-inch aperture and a few minutes' patient scrutiny ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor |
