Eight Familiar Lectures on Astronomy, Intended as an Introduction to the Science...

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W. Phillips, 1817 - 254 pages

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Page 159 - ... a degree of brightness about as strong as that with which such a coal would be seen to glow in faint daylight.
Page 250 - And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
Page 159 - Hence we may compute that the shining or burning matter must be above three miles in diameter. It is of an irregular round figure, and very sharply defined on the edges. The other two...
Page 158 - April 19, 10h 36", sidereal time. I perceive (says he) three volcanoes in different places of the dark part of the new moon. Two of them are either already nearly extinct, or otherwise in a state of going to break out; which perhaps may be decided next lunation. The third shows an actual eruption of fire or luminous matter.
Page 155 - ... spring from their rugged flanks, and threatening the valleys below, seem to bid defiance to the laws of gravitation. Around the base of these frightful eminences, are strewed numerous loose and unconnected fragments, which time seems to have detached from their parent mass ; and when we examine the rents and ravines which accompany the over-hanging cliffs, we expect every moment that they are to be torn from their base, and that the process of destructive separation which we had only contemplated...
Page 97 - The common names, or meaning of these words, in the same order, are, the Ram, the Bull, the Twins, the Crab, the Lion, the Virgin, the Scales, the Scorpion, the Archer, the Goat, the Waterer, and the Fishes. Fig. 183. The 12 signs of the zodiac, together with the sun, and the earth revolving around him, are represented at fig.
Page 39 - The same astronomer also ascertained, that the squares of the times of revolution of the different planets are in proportion to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun.
Page 130 - The space between the Tropic of Cancer and the Arctic Circle is called the North Temperate Zone, and that between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Antarctic Circle is the South Temperate Zone.
Page 234 - Those which appear largest, are called stars of the first magnitude ; the next to them in lustre, stars of the second magnitude ; and so on to the sixth, which are the smallest that are visible to the bare eye.
Page 159 - The other two volcanoes are much farther towards the centre of the moon, and resemble large, pretty faint nebulae, that are gradually much brighter in the middle ; but no well defined luminous spot can be discerned in them. These three spots are plainly to be distinguished from the rest of the marks upon the moon ; for the reflection of the sun's rays from the earth is, in its present situation, sufficiently bright, with a...

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