Abstract
ON January 14, 1742, died Edmond Halley, a remarkable man whose name is familiar to the public through the famous comet that is called after him. Born on October 29, 1656, in affluent circumstances, Halley took an early interest in astronomy. He went to St. Helena for two years, 1676-78, to observe the positions of bright southern stars, and while there observed the transit of Mercury of November 7, 1677, being the first person to observe both ingress and egress at the same transit. On his return, he published in 1679 the “Catalogus Stellarum Australium”; in this he referred to the utility of observations of transits of the inferior planets for determining the solar parallax. Reverting to this subject in the Philosophical Transactions of 1694 and 1716, he proposed that the length of time taken by the planet to cross the sun's disk should be observed at a number of suitably selected stations ; from the differences in these times, the solar parallax can be inferred. The method has the advantage of not requiring elaborate instrumental equipment but suffers from the disadvantage that it requires the visibility of both entrance and exit at the same station. The method was widely used at the transits of Venus of 1761, 1769, 1874 and 1882.
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JONES, H. EDMOND HALLEY, 1656-1742. Nature 149, 69–71 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/149069a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/149069a0