Andrea Wulf

Chasing Venus: Out of the Diaries: October 1768

Here is another one of my blog entry on the Transit of Venus Project 

As I’m sitting at Boston airport, hoping to be able to get out before a snow storm is going to hit Massachusetts, I’m thinking of Jesuit priest Maximilian Hell who exactly 243 years ago, at the end of October was facing his first Arctic snow storm in Vardø. After a long and harrowing journey from Vienna to Vardø at the most north-eastern corner of Norway, Hell had arrived in mid-October 1768. The last part of the voyage had been by boat from Trondheim along the rugged coast of Norway. For six weeks their vessel performed an erratic dance on the rough sea. Icy waves crashed into their small cabin and several times they feared for their lives and instruments, worried that the sea would ‘bury’ them forever. Only the sailors, Hell’s assistant observed with disbelief, became increasingly happier, ‘the wilder it roared around us’.

On 11 October 1768, they arrived at the Danish garrison Vardø and immediately searched for a location for their observatory. They settled on the centre of the small town but with hardly any timber on the island, Vardø’s commander advised them to send their boat to the mainland to procure the necessary building materials. Amid snowstorms and freezing temperatures, it took two months to build the observatory.

At the end of October they encountered their first fierce storm – whipping snow across the island while mountain-high waves crashed on to the shore. They couldn’t see any stars, the provisions froze and burst their containers, and with an icy wind blowing through the shutters and walls, sleeping was almost impossible. On 31 October Hell and his assistant had enough and bought some ‘good furs’ to keep warm – but winter was only just beginning.

for blog entry on Transit of Venus Project click here

Chasing Venus: Amateurs and Spectators

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.

click here

"The Brother Gardeners" in Italy as "La Confraternita Dei Giardinieri"

"The Brother Gardeners was just published in Italy, titled "La Confraternita Dei Giardinieri" published by Ponte alle Grazie. 

click here for information

And here is a nice review of it in Elle Italy click here