Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Ecliptic   Listen
noun
ecliptic  n.  
1.
(Astron.) A great circle of the celestial sphere, making an angle with the equinoctial of about 23° 28´. It is the apparent path of the sun, or the real path of the earth as seen from the sun.
2.
(Geog.) A great circle drawn on a terrestrial globe, making an angle of 23° 28´ with the equator; used for illustrating and solving astronomical problems.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Ecliptic" Quotes from Famous Books



... the original story rests. One such interpretation of the Deluge narrative in Babylonia, particularly favoured by recent German writers, would regard it as reflecting the passage of the Sun through a portion of the ecliptic. It is assumed that the primitive Babylonians were aware that in the course of ages the spring equinox must traverse the southern or watery region of the zodiac. This, on their system, signified a submergence of the whole universe in water, and the Deluge myth would symbolize ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King

... hunters, who eternities ago, hunted the moose in Orion; by the minstrels, who sang in the Milky Way when Jesus our Saviour was born. Then shall we list to no shallow gossip of Magellans and Drakes; but give ear to the voyagers who have circumnavigated the Ecliptic; who rounded the Polar Star as Cape Horn. Then shall the Stagirite and Kant be forgotten, and another folio than theirs be turned over for wisdom; even the folio now spread with horoscopes as yet undeciphered, the heaven of ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... 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 parallel to ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri

... 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 ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... recognised, and everything was ruled out and set in place again. A wonderful man! I think it would be true to say it was Linnaeus who set the world on its present twist of thinking, and levered our mental globe a little more perpendicular to the ecliptic. He actually gathered the dandelion and took it to bits like a scientific child; he touched nature with his fingers instead of sitting looking out of window—perhaps the first man who had ever done ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... trunks, Great horned emerald beetles crawling, Ants and huge slow butterflies That had strayed and lost the sun; Ah, sick I have swooned as the air thickened To a pallid brown ecliptic glow, And on the forest, fallen ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various

... belong to our atmosphere.) Does the periodical recurrence of this great phenomenon depend upon the state of the atmosphere? or upon something which the atmosphere receives from without, while the earth advances in the ecliptic? Of all this we are still as ignorant as mankind were in the days ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... all right," he answered. "Only I thought the announcement that the pole-star had thrown up its job might startle you a bit. But I see it doesn't. So far as practical results go, it accounts for the warmer climate and the decreased inclination to the plane of the ecliptic; or, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... circuit, crossing the equator at opposite points, and suggests the ecliptic or the rings of Saturn (see outside cover). A pale rainbow would describe a slanting circuit nearer white, and a dimmer one would fall within the sphere, while an intensely brilliant spectrum projects far beyond ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell

... the intense cold of winter and produce a uniform temperature for each degree of latitude the year round. At present the earth's axis—that is, the line passing through its centre and the two poles—is inclined to the ecliptic about twenty-three and a half degrees. Our summer is produced by the northern hemisphere's leaning at that angle towards the sun, and our winter by its turning that much from it. In one case the sun's rays are caused to shine more perpendicularly, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor

... study of astrology was intermixed with that of astronomy, of which Babylonia may be considered to be the birthplace. The heavens had been mapped out and the stars named; the sun's course along the ecliptic had been divided into the twelve zodiacal signs, and a fairly accurate calendar had been constructed. Hundreds of observations had been made of the eclipses of the sun and moon, and the laws regulating them had been so far ascertained that, first, eclipses of the moon, ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce

... which are still called the Signs of the Zodiac. In time even these observations were excelled, and it now appears certain that the Chaldaeans recognized the annual displacement of the equinoctial point upon the ecliptic, a discovery that is generally attributed to the Greek astronomers. But, like Hipparchus, they made faults of calculation in consequence of ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... 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 which ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... that the Earth is stationary, but Philolaus the Pythagorean says that it revolves in a circle about the fire of the ecliptic, like the sun and moon. Heraklides of Pontus and Ekphantus the Pythagorean make the Earth move, not changing its position, however, confined in its falling and rising around its own center in ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... Soku and the Akhimu Urdu have been very variously defined by different Egyptologists who have studied them. Chabas considered them to be gods or genii of the constellations of the ecliptic, which mark the apparent course of the sun through the sky. Following the indications given by Deveria, he also thought them to be the sailors of the solar bark, and perhaps the gods of the twelve hours, divided into two classes: the Akhimu Soku being those who are rowing, and the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... to the two points in the orbit of a planet where it crosses or intersects the ecliptic, called ascending when it goes N., and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com