United States or Fiji ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
While they are above the equatorial regions they do not become luminescent, because at the great elevation that they there occupy there is virtually no atmosphere; but as they pass on toward the north and the south they begin to descend with the lines of force, curving down to meet at the poles; and, encountering a part of the atmosphere comparable in density with what remains in an exhausted Crookes tube, they produce a glow of cathode rays.
The car turned from the fort and the mountains and shot away over the foothills toward the coastal plains. Below were forests, yellow-green with new foliage of the second growing-season of the equatorial year, veined with narrow dirt roads and spotted with occasional clearings. Farther east, the dirty gray woodsmoke of Ullr marked the progress of the charcoal-burnings.
The midsummer rains in the equatorial districts now made their influence felt, and in the middle of August the Nile covered the sandbanks and rocks that made navigation dangerous at the time of "low Nile." In the last week of that month all was ready for the long and carefully prepared advance.
An inhabitant of Jupiter, in making a trip around his planet, along any great circle of the sphere, would have to travel more than 30,000 miles farther than the distance between the earth and the moon. The polar compression of Jupiter, owing to his rapid rotation, amounts in the aggregate to more than 5,000 miles, the equatorial diameter being 88,200 miles and the polar diameter 83,000 miles.
These trade-winds, absorbing moisture from the sea, precipitate it as they rise again, and produce the constant equatorial rains; and these rains, doubtless, tend much more powerfully than the mere unequal distribution of heat to direct the wind toward the equator; for the fall of rain rapidly diminishes the pressure of the air and disturbs its equilibrium, so that violent winds are frequently observed to blow toward rainy districts.
Here it was caught by the return currents of air continually flowing northward and southward above the equatorial zone; and since, when these currents reach the temperate zone, where the surface rotation of the earth is less rapid, they continually flow eastward, the fine dust was thus carried at a great altitude completely around the earth.
Yet, though almost necessarily inferred to be equatorial, they made a considerable angle with the trend of the satellites' orbits. More distinctly by the brothers Henry, with the aid of their fine refractor, two gray parallel rulings, separated by a brilliant zone, were discerned every clear night at Paris from January to June, 1884.
I instruct them separately, first in the use of the meridian instrument, and next in that of the equatorial. They obtain the time for the college by meridian passage of stars; they use the equatorial just as far as they can do with very insufficient mechanism.
This seemed the more probable, from the fact, that we were to the west of the island, when we lost sight of it, and that the great equatorial current, which traverses the Pacific and Indian oceans, has a prevailing westerly course, though among the more extensive groups and clusters of islands, it is so often deflected hither and thither, by the obstacles which it encounters, or turned upon itself, in eddies or counter-currents, that no certain calculations can be made respecting it.
Thrust away to the south by that great ocean-river, it lies in a vast eddy, or central pool of the Atlantic, between the Gulf Stream and the equatorial current, unmoved save by surface-drifts of wind, as floating weeds collect and range slowly round and round in the still corners of a tumbling-bay or salmon pool.
Word Of The Day