"Fixed star" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as a partial eclipse in England and was total on the Continent, especially in Switzerland. A certain Captain Stannyan who made observations at Berne, writes thus to Flamsteed[98]:—"That the Sun was totally darkened there for four and a half minutes of time; that a fixed star and a planet appeared very bright; and that his getting out of his eclipse was preceded by a blood-red streak of light from its left limb, which continued not longer than six or seven seconds of time; then ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... more of them, and many of these had been resolved by his largest telescopes into clusters of stars. He believed that the farthest of these nebulae that he could see was at least three hundred thousand times as distant from us as the nearest fixed star. Yet that nearest star—so more recent studies prove—is so remote that its light, travelling one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second, requires three and one-half years ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Nunsmere, bringing with her an echo of comic opera and an odor of Peau d'Espagne. She dawned on Septimus's horizon like a mischievous and impertinent planet, so different from Zora, the great fixed star of his heaven, yet so pretty, so twinkling, so artlessly and so obviously revolving round some twopenny-halfpenny sun of her own, that he took her, with Wiggleswick, the ducks and the donkey, into ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... conjunction with Mars on the 4th, at 1 h. morning; on the 6th with the fixed star, Regulus, or Corheoni; with Venus on the 18th, at midnight; and in superior conjunction with the Sun on the 24th, at 9-1/2 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... 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
... 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
... which we know to have taken place, we have a cause, not indeed established as a fact, but readily admissible as something beyond a bare possibility, fully adequate to the utmost requirements of geology. A change of half a magnitude on the luster of our sun, regarded as a fixed star, spread over successive geological epochs—now progressive, now receding, now stationary—is what no astronomer would now hesitate to admit as a perfectly reasonable and ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... continual plodders ever won, Save base authority from others' books. These earthly godfathers of heaven's light, That give a name to every fixed star, Have no more profit of their shining nights Than those that walk, and wot not ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... almost immeasurable in extent. The orbit of the earth round the sun is of such size that a railway train running sixty miles an hour, with never a stop, would take about three hundred and fifty years to cross it. Represent this orbit by a lady's finger-ring. Then the nearest fixed star will be about a mile and a half away; the next more than two miles; a few more from three to twenty miles; the great body at scores or hundreds of miles. Imagine the stars thus scattered from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and keep this little finger-ring ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... 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
... thousand; six hundred and fifty of them being known to be binary, or revolving on 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
... from that fixed star would argue that the Ball must be some malignant creature of fiendish power, the great enemy of the human race. Watching our cricket-fields, our tennis-courts, our golf links, he would conclude that a certain section of mankind had been told off to do battle ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... calculations of Adams might be correct in form and deduction. He accordingly sent word to Professor Challis to begin a search for the unknown orb. The latter did begin the work of exploration, and presently saw the planet. But he failed to recognize it! There it was; but the observer passed it over as a fixed star. As for Leverrier, he sent his calculations to Dr. Galle, of Berlin; and that great observer began his search. On the night of the twenty-third of September, 1846, he not only saw but caught the far-off world. There it was, disc ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... they have issued from different points of this body, unite together in such a way that they sensibly compose one single wave only, which, consequently, ought to have enough force to make itself felt. Thus this infinite number of waves which originate at the same instant from all points of a fixed star, big it may be as the Sun, make practically only one single wave which may well have force enough to produce an impression on our eyes. Moreover from each luminous point there may come many thousands of waves in the smallest imaginable time, by the frequent percussion ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... say, to-day, and after waiting six months, to enable the earth to reach the other extremity of its vast orbit, another observation is taken, and yet it is found, as we shall see later on, that the distance of the nearest fixed star is so stupendous that even this base line, of 186,000,000 miles, shows absolutely no inclination between the two telescopes except in about a dozen cases, and even in those the angle of parallax, perceivable, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... swift as light from a fixed star, the answer came to me. I arose and hurried—hurried as so many reasoners must, back around my circle. I knew the answer and I hugged it in my breast as I flew, fearing lest some one would stop me and demand ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... condemned to be hanged. Turnbull looked up 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 was ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton |
