PRECESSION • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Precession

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noun

Precession n. The act of going before, or forward.

Lunisolar precession. (Astron.) See under Lunisolar.

Planetary precession, that part of the precession of the equinoxes which depends on the action of the planets alone.

Precession of the equinoxes (Astron.), the slow backward motion of the equinoctial points along the ecliptic, at the rate of 50.2" annually, caused by the action of the sun, moon, and planets, upon the protuberant matter about the earth's equator, in connection with its diurnal rotation; so called because either equinox, owing to its westerly motion, comes to the meridian sooner each day than the point it would have occupied without the motion of precession, and thus precedes that point continually with reference to the time of transit and motion.

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Etymology of 'Precession'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Precession" Quotes from Famous Books

... as a basis of subsequent star-catalogues.[1] The Ptolemaic catalogue embraces only those stars which were visible at Rhodes in the time of Hipparchus (c. 150 B.C.), the results being corrected for precession "by increasing the longitudes by 2 deg. 40', and leaving the latitudes undisturbed" (Francis Baily, Mem. R.A.S., 1843). The names and orientation of the constellations therein adopted are, with but few exceptions, identical with those ...

— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust so long—even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry—are alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils, and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of heaven! And all this for a bit ...

— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... wearisome to read the record. Yet it is the chronicle of Christendom during one of the most important and fateful epochs of modern history. No man can thoroughly understand the complication and precession of phenomena attending the disastrous dawn of the renewed war, on an even more awful scale than the original conflict in the Netherlands, without studying the correspondence of Barneveld. The history of Europe is there. ...

— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... on to say that the Greeks "imparted their scientific view of the Universe to the East. They became the teachers of the East in astronomy as in medicine and other sciences, and the credit of having discovered the law of the precession of the equinoxes belongs to Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer, who announced this important theory about the year 130 B.C."[346] Undoubtedly the Greeks contributed to the advancement of the science of astronomy, with which, ...

— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

Words linked to "Precession" : precedence, precedency, precession of the equinoxes, precede