Abstract
THREE hundred years age on Sunday, November 24 (O.S.), 1639, the young Lancashire curate Jeremiah Horrocks, and his friend William Crabtree, the one at Hoole, near Preston, and the other at Broughton, near Manchester, observed the transit of Venus across the sun's disk, and thus, as Robert Grant said, “did two young men cultivating astronomy together in a state of almost complete seclusion in one of the northern counties of England enjoy the privilege of witnessing a phenomenon which human eyes had never before beheld and which no one was destined again to see until more than a hundred years had passed away”. At Broughton the sky had been overcast most of the day, but fortunately cleared just in time for Crabtree to see the transit. At Hoole, Horrocks had watched from sunrise until his duties called him to church. At 3.15 p.m., when again free, he resumed his observations, when, as he wrote, “Oh most gratifying spectacle ! the object of so many earnest wishes, I perceived a new spot of unusual magnitude, and of perfectly round form, that had just wholly entered upon the left limb of the sun, so that the margins of the sun and the spot coincided with each other, forming the angle of contact.” Owing to the approach of sunset, he was unable to observe the planet longer than half an hour, but during this period he measured its distance from the sun three times. His younger brother Jonas at Liverpool was prevented from seeing the transit on account of cloud.
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Horrocks's Observation of the Transit of Venus. Nature 144, 860–861 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144860b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144860b0