here is my most recent blog entry from the Transit of Venus project.
I’ve finally finished the manuscript for my book “Chasing Venus” (which is about the 1761 and 1769 transits) and can now start looking forward to the 2012 transit. We’ve been hearing a lot about plans of viewing the transit next June. Some of you will be watching from an observatory, others might be following it from their balconies – it was just the same in the eighteenth century. There were the professional astronomers who timed Venus’s march across the sun from observatories in London, Paris and Stockholm as well as from remote corners of the globe such as Tahiti or the North Cape. We know much more about them than about the countless amateurs and spectators who just enjoyed the spectacle of the rare celestial encounter – here and there we discover an account of them.
Louis XV’s Château de la Muette near Paris must have been packed on 3 June 1769 because when a sudden shower interrupted the transit, large crowd of sightseers pushed into the observing pavilion with much ‘noise and confusion’ – as the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly complained. Equally full was the Stockholm observatory during the 1761 transit – there was Queen Louisa Ulrika and her fifteen-year-old son, Crown Prince Gustav as well as politicians, noblemen, foreign ambassadors and other spectators – all jostling for space at 3 a.m. Once everybody had squeezed in, it became immediately clear that the assembled astronomers would not be able to see the clock – and so it was decided that one of them would have to call out the minutes and seconds. Even Jesuit priests and astronomers Maximilian Hell and his assistant János Sajnovics who had traveled to Vardø in the Arctic Circle had plenty of guests in their observatory.
Though astronomers remained glued to their telescopes even when clouds and rain prevented them from seeing anything, their audiences quickly ran out of patience. Some looked for better entertainment. As Steven wrote in one of his previous entries Swedish astronomer Johan Henrik Lidén who was in Leiden during the 1769 transit resolved to see an ‘earthly Venus’ in the opera house when a thunderstorm obscured the sky. These earthly pleasures were also enjoyed by some ‘young Bloods’ in London who, a newspaper reported, after they had seen the black dot on the sun ‘made a Transit into Covent Garden among a number of the said beautiful Planets’ – an area of the city at that time well known for its prostitutes.
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