The act of preceding (as in a ceremony)

Usage examples of precession.

Let us therefore not attempt to dislodge the Greek astronomer from his pedestal as the discoverer of precession unless we can find a significantly more accurate value recorded in a significantly more ancient source.

Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

He could imagine those shining rotors starting to turn, spinning faster and faster, spinning, precessing at right angles to all the dimensions of normal space, tumbling through the dark infinities, dragging the ship and all aboard her with them as the temporal precession field built up.

Richard slowly turned each over, idly looking for anything that made sense to him as Zedd droned on about overlapping transpositional forks and triple duplexes bound to conjugated roots compromised by precession and sequential, proportional, binary inversions shrouding flawed bifurcations that the formulas revealed which could only be detected through Subtractive levorotatory.

Since then, due to the precession of the equinoxes, the signs have changed.

At other times I was haunted in my nightly vigils by the problem of precession of the equinoxes, as calculated long ago by Hipparchus of Alexandria.

When the Sector arrives, they set up upon a Bluff overlooking Monon-gahela, and watch the Culmination of Stars in Lyra and Cygnus, correcting for seconds plus and minus of Aberration, Deviation, Precession, and Refraction, whilst in Cabins nearby the Wives of the new-hir'd Axmen gather, and those Axmen who may, come thro', and out the back, to take White Maize Whiskey out of a Tin Cup.

Also because of the phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes, the four points on the colures (the two equinoxes and the two solstices) will appear to drift westwards at the very slow rate of 50.

But can chance account for the fact that these and other prime integers of precession keep cropping up in supposedly unrelated mythologies from all over the world, and in such stolid but enduring vehicles as calendar systems and works of architecture?

Incredible as it seems, the perimeter of the pyramid comes within 20 feet of equaling the diameter of the Earth, when our planet's dimensions are scaled down to a ratio equaling 1:43,200, numbers representing our mathematical code of precession.

The pole star by then, because of precession of the equinoxes, was a dim thing once called Gamma Cephei.

But if they were constructed by the Aoi, if they're that old, then because of the precession of the equinoxes it would have been other stars rising at that notch at this day and time of year, other threads of light laying the weft into the shed than the ones that rise in these days at this time.

The ones he studied were first, the 26,000-year precession of the equinoxes, resulting from the slow wobble of the Earth's axis.

Here in these galleries she had set her memory pictures of the cycles of the wandering stars and the precession of the equinoxes.

They might be driven by the precession of the equinoxes, a well-known motion akin to the slow, drifting precession of a rapidly spinning top.