"Fixed star" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... equinoctial line. But the southern hemisphere of the heavens does not have a polar star to indicate the south, so that if you will now look directly above us you will notice two very bright stars. One of them is the fixed star Sirius, the most brilliant in the heavens; the other is Canopus, and a line along these two stars would go around the celestial sphere and point to ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... the knowledge which had come to her through the rector, which made the whole work and service of her life seem all too little for her to give in return for this boon. As for Horace, her feeling for him was akin to worship. It was he who represented to her henceforth the ideal which, like a fixed star, should give light to her path, though so ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... 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
... is a curious fact that Morin had about this time proposed to determine the longitude by the moon's distance from a fixed star, and that the commissioners assembled in Paris to examine it requested Galileo's opinion of its value and practicability. Galileo's opinion was highly unfavourable. He saw clearly, and explained distinctly, the objection to Morin's method, arising ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... 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 spaces, with a velocity compared with which the cannon-ball ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett |
