Abstract
ON January 3 occurred the tercentenary of the death of the young Lancashire curate Jeremiah Horrocks, whom Herschel spoke of as the pride and boast of British astronomy. In the fourteenth year of the reign of Charles I, and some twenty years before the foundation of the Royal Society, in the hamlet of Toxteth Park near Liverpool and in the village of Hoole, eight miles south of Preston, Horrocks, with the aid of the tables of Lansberg and the works of Kepler, recalculated the transit of Venus and, on Sunday afternoon, November 24, 1639, in between his church services at Hoole, had the great satisfaction of watching the passage of the planet across the sun's disk. His friend, William Crabtree, also observed the transit from near Manchester, but Horrocks's brother Jonas, at Liverpool, failed to see it owing to clouds. Within fourteen months of his achievement, Horrocks had passed away, being then but twenty-two or twenty-four years of age. He had, however completed his “Venus in Sole Visa”.
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Tercentenary of Jeremiah Horrocks. Nature 147, 23 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/147023a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/147023a0