heliostat

See also: Heliostat and héliostat

English

heliostat on Wikipedia

Circa 1750, from New Latin heliostata, from Ancient Greek ἥλιος (hḗlios, “sun”) + Latin status (“stationary”). By surface analysis, helio- +‎ -stat.

heliostat (plural heliostats)

A device that includes a plane mirror which turns so as to keep reflecting sunlight toward a predetermined target, compensating for the sun's apparent motions in the sky. The target may be a physical object, distant from the heliostat, or a direction in space, and is almost always stationary relative to the heliostat, so the light is reflected in a fixed direction.
- 2005 June 2, Timothy Williams, “INK; Here Comes the Sun, Redirected”, in The New York Times‎^[1], archived from the original on 29 May 2015:
  Each heliostat can be directed to bathe a particular park bench or tree in a beam of light. […] The three heliostats cost $355,000 together, not apiece.
- 2024, Jasper Fforde, Red Side Story, Hodder & Stoughton, page 90:
  In reply, the clockwork heliostats that had tracked the sun to reflect light into the indoor areas during the day now swivelled towards the street lamp to do the same for the night.

device to continuously reflect sunlight toward a predetermined target, almost always in some fixed direction, despite the sun's motions in the sky

heliostat n (plural heliostate)

	indefinite	definite	indefinite	definite
	singular		plural
nominative-accusative	heliostat	heliostatul	heliostate	heliostatele
genitive-dative	heliostat	heliostatului	heliostate	heliostatelor
vocative	heliostatule		heliostatelor