"Orbital motion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... decidedly unequal at different parts of his orbit, so that many oppositions must be used to determine the mean motion. The ancients had noticed that what was called the "second inequality," due as we now know to the orbital motion of the earth, only vanished when earth, sun, and planet were in line, i.e. at the planet's opposition; therefore they used oppositions to determine the mean motion, but deemed it necessary to apply a correction ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... of August 11th, 1877, is famous in modern astronomy. Mars has been a special object of study in all ages; but on that evening Professor Hall, of Washington, discovered a satellite of Mars. On the 16th it was seen again, and its orbital motion followed. On the following night it was hidden behind the body of the planet when the observation began, but at the calculated time—at four o'clock in the morning—it emerged, and established its character as a true moon, and not a fixed ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... conjunction with Mr. (later Sir James) South, a series of observations, issuing in the presentation to the Royal Society of a paper[111] containing micrometrical measurements of 380 binary stars, by which the elder Herschel's inferences of orbital motion were, in many cases, strikingly confirmed. A star in the Northern Crown, for instance (Eta Coronae), had completed more than one entire circuit since its first discovery; another, Tau Ophiuchi, had closed up into apparent ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... must still be about four times as far from the earth as the earth is from the sun. This great globe will also illustrate the law that the more distant a planet is, the slower is the velocity with which its orbital motion is accomplished. While the earth passes over eighteen miles each second, Jupiter only accomplishes eight miles. Thus for a twofold reason the time occupied by an exterior planet in completing a revolution is greater than ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Hall's parallax of 0.27", is about 70,000,000,000,000 miles. There is some question whether or not it is a binary, for, while the twin stars are both moving in the same direction in space with comparative rapidity, yet conclusive evidence of orbital motion is lacking. When one has noticed the contrast in apparent size between this comparatively near-by star, which the naked eye only detects with considerable difficulty, and some of its brilliant neighbors whose distance is so great as to be immeasurable with our present ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss |
