The Collaborative International Dictionary
Precession \Pre*ces"sion\, n. [L. praecedere, praecessum, to go before: cf. F. pr['e]cession. See Precede.] 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[sec] 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.
Wiktionary
n. The slow westward shift of the equinoxes along the plane of the ecliptic, resulting from precession of the earth's axis of rotation, and causing the equinoxes to occur earlier each year
WordNet
n. a slow westward shift of the equinoxes along the plane of the ecliptic caused by precession of the Earth's axis of rotation
Usage examples of "precession of the equinoxes".
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.
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.
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.
They even knew about the 'precession of the equinoxes', a cyclic variation that completes one cycle every 26,000 years.
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.
Even if its maker had been aware of it, there was no way to build into a machine of cogs and gears as gross as this one the slow, the vast fall of the Cosmos backward through the Zodiac, the so-called precession of the equinoxes--that unimaginably stately grand tour which would take some twenty thousand years longer, until once again the spring equinox coincided with the first degrees of Aries: where conventional astrology for convenience's sake assumes it always to be, and where Hawksquill had found it fixed in her Cosmo-Opticon when she had first aquired the thing.
I envisaged a new Cosmological Calendar, based on the precession of the equinoxes-that is, the slow dipping of the axis of our planet, under the uneven gravitational influence of sun and moon-a cycle which takes twenty millennia to complete.
I envisaged a new Cosmological Calendar, based on the precession of the equinoxes&mdash.