"Total eclipse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... date to compare with the first of the two eclipses of 552; this is because I omitted to notice that there had been recorded in the "Springs and Autumns" two so close together, and therefore I did not include it in the list sent to the Observatory; but with the exception of the total eclipse of 601, all the other eclipses, so far as days of the moon and month go, are as consistent with each other as are modern Chinese dates with European (Julian) dates. As regards the year, Oppolzer's dates are the "astronomical" dates, ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... intelligible, but to witness his smile, or rather his effort at one, was to witness an unnatural phenomenon of the most awful kind, and little short of a prodigy. If one could suppose the sun giving a melancholy and lugubrious grin through the darkness of a total eclipse, they might form some conception of the jocular solemnity which threw its deep but comic shadow over his visage. One might expect the whole machinery of the face, with as much probability as that of a mill, to change its habitual motions, and turn in an opposite direction. It ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Shah of Persia. The Shah evidently thought that his bloodthirsty request had been attended to, though with some delay. He proceeded to tell the new Astronomer Royal that he had a few days before writing witnessed a total eclipse of the sun in the observatory at Teheran. This was perfectly correct. The suggestion was that the Teheran astronomers knew their business, and had the good sense to arrange an eclipse when a Royal Visitor wished for one, and so escape decapitation—a course which ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... assisting at a funeral. There was not a symptom of amusement, but they all stared at us unflinchingly, as if a single wink of their eyelids would cause them to lose some extraordinary spectacle. If I had been a total eclipse of the sun, and they a group of enthusiastic astronomers bent upon observing every phenomenon, they could not have gazed more steadily. Minima was leaning against me, half asleep. A narrow vista of tall houses lay to the right and left, lost in ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... the eclipse of the sun, which occurred in 1715, added greatly to Halley's reputation. This phenomenon excited special attention, inasmuch as it was the first total eclipse of the sun which had been visible in London since the year 1140. Halley undertook the necessary calculations, and predicted the various circumstances with a far higher degree of precision than the official announcement. He himself observed the phenomenon from the Royal Society's rooms, ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... are built of peccable clay,—but these occur so seldom that one can sit with a feeling of security that is not possible at Covent Garden. In "The Valkyrie" the fire does not flare up ten minutes late; the coming of evening does not suggest an unexpected total eclipse of the sun; the thing that the score indicates is done, and not, as generally happens at Covent Garden, the reverse thing. The colours of the scenery are likewise as intolerably German as ever—the greens coarse and rank, the yellows bilious, the blues tinged with ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... entered the conflict well marshaled and eager, but Hannibal and the Carthaginians listlessly and in dejection, a dejection for which a total eclipse of the sun at this time was largely accountable. From this combination of circumstances Hannibal suspected that this, too, foreboded to them nothing auspicious. In this frame of mind they stationed ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio |
