Horrocks, Crabtree and the 1639 transit of Venus

Abstract

British research astronomy began in 1693, when Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree observed the transit of Venus in 1639. They were the only two people to observe this event and their observations and their own predictions that prompted them were a turning point on the journey from the classical astronomy of documentation and tabulation to the modern idea of observation, prediction and comprehension. The transit observations made by Horrocks from a small village in Lancashire, spurred on by inaccuracies in the tables that constituted the bulk of astronomy at the time, were the foundation for much of the flowering of astronomical thinking in Britain during the late 17th century. Despite the early deaths of both Horrocks and Crabtree, and thanks largely to the efforts of contemporary north-country astronomers, Horrocks's work on the transit was recognized both among the British scientific elite at the Royal Society and among the European pioneers of the modern astronomy, one of whom put Horrocks on a par with that of Galileo, Gassendi and Kepler.