Word Finder - meridian

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The south.

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Midday, noon.

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A great circle passing through the poles of the celestial sphere and the zenith for a particular point on the earth's surface.

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An imaginary great circle on the Earth's surface, passing through the geographic poles, or that half of such a circle extending from pole to pole, all points of which have the same longitude.

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The highest or most developed point of something; culmination, splendour.

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A particular area or situation considered as having a specific identity or characteristic; the tastes or habits of a specific locale, group etc.

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The middle period of someone's life, when they are at full strength or abilities; one's prime.

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A line passing through the poles of any sphere; a notional line on the surface of a round or curved body.

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A dram drunk at midday.

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(acupuncture) Any of the pathways on the body along which the vital energy is thought to flow and, therefore, the acupoints are distributed.

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The size of type between double great primer and canon, standardized as 44-point.

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Meridional; relating to a meridian.

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Relating to noon

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Relating to the highest point or culmination.

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meridian splendour

The axis of this band, almost a meridian line, is 156 statute miles long.

It marks the first meridian of longitude in Hindu geography.

From the springs the journey was continued along the same meridian to the Fitzroy river.

It enters the Maranon very near the 74th meridian.

By authority, therefore, of Queensland, the mainland of New Guinea, opposite her shores east of the 141st meridian, was annexed to that colony in 1883.

At what time did the Moon cross the meridian?

Finally, however, in 1884 a British protectorate was authoritatively proclaimed by Commodore Erskine over the region " lying between the 141st meridian eastward as far as East Cape, with the adjacent islands as far as Kosman Island."

To Germany were assigned all the territory and islands to the north of the British boundary under the name of Kaiser Wilhelms Land, while all to the west of the 141st meridian remained under its old flag as Dutch New Guinea.

America, broadening in the north as if to span the oceans by reaching to its neighbours on the east and west, tapering between vast oceans far to the south where the nearest land is in the little-known Antarctic regions, roughly presents the triangular outline that is to be expected from tetrahedral warping; and although greatly broken in the middle, and standing with the northern and southern parts out of a meridian line, America is nevertheless the best witness among the continents of to-day to the tetrahedral theory.

While the majority of his researches bear on one or other of the subjects just mentioned, others deal with such widely different topics as the birds of Greenland, ocean temperatures, the Gulf Stream, barometric measurement of heights, arcs of meridian, glacier transport of rocks, the volcanoes of the Hawaiian Islands, and various points of meteorology.

With the tables of the sun's declination then available, he could calculate his latitude by meridian altitudes of the sun taken with his astrolabe.

Formerly each nation took its own capital or principal observatory as the standard meridian from which longitudes were measured.

While the system of counting from the capital of the country is still used for local purposes, the tendency in recent years is to use the meridian of Greenwich for nautical and international purposes.

This area extends from the mist meridian up the White river for about 120 m.

This border-range, which continues on to the 97th meridian, separates the Nan-shan range from the Pe-shan range.

From 1792 to 1799 he was occupied with the measurement of the arc of the meridian extending from Dunkirk to Barcelona, and published a detailed account of the operations in Base du systeme metrique (3 vols., 1806, 1807, 1810), for which he was awarded in 181 o the decennial prize of the Institute.

His work Eratosthenes Batavus, published in 1617, describes the method and gives as the result of his operations between Alkmaar and Bergen-opZoom a degree of the meridian equal to 55,100 toises =117,449 yds.

From the meridian of Garm or Harm it rises above the snowline, attaining at least 18,000 ft.

Judged from the standpoint of empirical science, philosophy passed its meridian in Plato and Aristotle, declined in the post-Aristotelian systems, and set in the darkness of Neoplatonism.

Bailey, was accordingly despatched (1889), and the meridian photometer erected successively in three different positions on the slopes of the Andes.

The places of the objects were at the same time determined with the Dorpat meridian circle (Stellarum fixarum imprimis duplicium et multiplicium positiones mediae, St Petersburg, 1852 seq.).

No part of Central America contains a greater diversity of tribes, and in 1883 Otto Stoll estimated the number of spoken languages as eighteen, although east of the meridian of Lake Amatitlan the native speech has almost entirely disappeared and been replaced by Spanish.

The Great Plains.A broad stretch of country underlaid by nearly horizontal strata extends westward from the 97th meridian to the base of the Rocky Mountains, a distance of from 300 to 500 in., and northward from the Mexican, boundary far into Canada.

The line separating the two phases of the system is a little east of the 1 ooth meridian.

The Lower Austral zone occupies the greater part of the Southern states, and is divided near the 98th meridian into an eastern humid or Austroriparian area and a western arid or Lower Sonoran area.

Only an eighth of the countrys total population lived in I900 west of the 96th meridian, which divides the country into two nearly equal parts.

Repsold introduced essential improvements in the meridian circles by substituting microscopes (on Jesse Ramsden's plan) for the verniers to read the circles, and by making the various parts perfectly symmetrical.

For a number of years the firm furnished meridian circles to the observatories at Hamburg, Konigsberg, Pulkova, &c.; later on its activity declined, while Pistor and Martins of Berlin rose to eminence.

The measurement of the declination involves two separate observations, namely, the determination of (a) the magnetic meridian and (b) the geographical meridian, the angle between the two being the declination.

In order to determine the magnetic meridian the orientation of the magnetic FIG.

The telescope B serves to observe the scale attached to the magnet when determining the magnetic meridian, and to observe the sun or star when determining the geographical meridian.

The mean of all the readings of the verniers gives the reading on the azimuth circle corresponding to the magnetic meridian.

Hence if the readings of the verniers on the azimuth circle are made when the transit is observed we can deduce the reading corresponding to the geographical meridian.

The above method of determining the geographical meridian has the serious objection that it is necessary to know the error of the chronometer with very considerable accuracy, a matter of some difficulty when observing at any distance from a fixed observatory.

Hence in more recent patterns of magnetometer it is usual to do away with the transit mirror method of observing and either to use a separate theodolite to observe the azimuth of some distant object, which will then act as a fixed mark when making the declination observations, or to attach to the magnetometer an altitude telescope and circle for use when determining the geographical meridian.

In the case of the Kew pattern unifilar the same magnet that is used for the declination is usually employed for determining H, and for the purposes of the vibration experiment it is mounted as for the observation of the magnetic meridian.

What is known as the method of sines is used, for since the axes of the two magnets are always at right angles when the mirror magnet is in its zero position, the ratio M/H is proportional to the sine of the angle between the magnetic axis of the mirror magnet and the magnetic - = meridian.

The difference between the two sets of readings gives twice the angle which the magnetic axis of the mirror magnet makes with the magnetic meridian.

Omitting correction terms depending on the temperature and on the inductive effect of the earth's magnetism on the moment of the deflecting magnet, if 0 is the angle which the axis of the deflected magnet makes with the meridian when the centre of the deflecting magnet is at a distance r, then zM sin B=I+P+y2 &c., in which P and Q are constants depending on the dimensions and magnetic states of the two magnets.

In order to obtain the declination a pivoted magnet is used to obtain the magnetic meridian, the geographical meridian being obtained by observations on the sun or stars.

Following the first chart of lines of equal variation compiled by Edmund Halley in 1700, charts of similar type have been published from time to time embodying recent observations and corrected for the secular change, thus providing seamen with values of the variation accurate to about 30' of arc. Possessing these data, it is easy to ascertain by observation the effects of the iron in a ship in disturbing the compass, and it will be found for the most part in every vessel that the needle is deflected from the magnetic meridian by a horizontal angle called the deviation of the compass; in some directions of the ship's head adding to the known variation of the place, in other directions subtracting from it.

Although a compass may thus be made practically correct for a given time and place, the magnetism of the ship is liable to changes on changing her geographical position, and especially so when steaming at right angles or nearly so to the magnetic meridian, for then sub-permanent magnetism is developed in the hull.

In 1784 Virginia agreed to the extension of the line and to the establishment of the western limit (the present boundary between Pennsylvania and Ohio) as the meridian from a point on the Mason and Dixon line five degrees of longitude west of the Delaware river.

This was followed by a zone-catalogue of 73,160 stars (1884), and a general catalogue (1885) compiled from meridian observations of 32,448 stars.

Mechain in the attempt to determine an arc of the meridian, and the greater number of the instruments employed in the task were invented by him.

On most of the country west of the 97th meridian and extending to the Pacific Ocean less than 20 in.

Auroral Meridian.-It is a common belief that the summit of an auroral arc is to be looked for in the observer's magnetic meridian.

Thus there must in general be a difference between the observer's magnetic meridian - answering to the mean position of the magnetic needle at his station - and the direction the needle would have at a given hour, if undisturbed by the aurora, at any spot where the phenomena which the observer sees as aurora exist.

But clearly, whilst the arcs and bands, and to a lesser extent the patches, showed a marked preference for the magnetic meridian, the rays showed no such preference.

The Swedish Expedition (17) of 1899-1902, engaged in measuring an arc of the meridian in Spitsbergen, were unusually well provided spectrographically, and succeeded in taking photographs of aurora in conjunction with artificial lines-chiefly of hydrogen-which led to results claiming exceptional accuracy.