Obliquity | astronomy | Britannica (original) (raw)

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history of astronomy

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  In astronomy: The Islamic world
  …Baghdad astronomers observed that the obliquity of the ecliptic had decreased from the value given in Ptolemy’s Almagest. The obliquity of the ecliptic is the angle between the celestial equator and the tropic of Cancer. It corresponds to the northward displacement of the Sun between the equinox and the summer…
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theory of astronomical cycles

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  In Pleistocene Epoch: Cause of the climatic changes and glaciations
  …about 100,000 years, (2) the obliquity, or tilt, of Earth’s axis away from a vertical drawn to the plane of the planet’s orbit, with a frequency of 41,000 years, and (3) the precession, or wobble, of Earth’s axis, with frequencies of 19,000 and 23,000 years. Collectively these parameters determine the…
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