Abstract
Nov. 24, 1639. Transit of Venus.—The rare occurrence of a transit of the planet Venus across the sun's disc was first predicted and then observed on this date (old reckoning) by Jeremiah Horrocks and also by his friend Wm. Crabtree to whom he had communicated his prediction. “I then beheld a most agreeable spectacle, the object of my sanguine wishes, a spot of unusual magnitude and of a perfectly circular shape, which had already fully entered upon the sun's disc on the left, so that the limbs of the Sun and Venus precisely coincided, forming an angle of contact. Not doubting that this was really the shadow of the planet, I immediately applied myself sedulously to observe it.” Only four other such transits have been seen, those of 1761, 1769, 1874, and 1882. The next is due in 2004.
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Historic Natural Events. Nature 126, 828 (1930). https://doi.org/10.1038/126828a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/126828a0