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Out of Diaries: 23 April 1769
Georg Moritz Lowitz from Göttingen was struggling. He was travelling on behalf of Catherine the Great to Guryev on the Caspian Sea – but having left St Petersburg (after an audience with the empress)...
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Out of Diaries: 28 April 1769
On 28 April 1769, Maximilian Hell’s expedition in Vardø almost came to a premature end. Since October 1768 Hell and his assistant had waited on the remote island in the Arctic Circle for the day of the...
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Out of Diaries: 2 May 1769
In Tahiti in the morning of 2 May 1769 Captain James Cook and astronomer Charles Green discovered that the large quadrant that they had brought from the Endeavour to Fort Venus was missing. They peered...
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Out of Diaries: 6 May 1761
On 6 May 1761, Charles Mason finally sat down and wrote a letter to the Royal Society – we can only imagine how worried he and his partner Jeremiah Dixon must have been because they had ignored their...
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Out of Diaries: 12 May 1769
Vardø was hidden under a thick blanket of white. A few weeks previously yet another storm had bucketed more snow on to the little island, but at least the long months of winter darkness had ended....
View ArticleOut of Diaries: 18 May 1761
18 May 1761 marked an important event for many of the transit astronomers because it was a night of a lunar eclipse – one of the celestial encounters by which they would be able to determine their...
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Out of Diaries: 24 May 1761
One of the most famous transit stories is the one of the unlucky French astronomer Le Gentil. He was the first to set out from France in March 1760 but never made a useful observation of the transits....
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Out of Diaries: 28 May 1761
In early April 1761, just after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, Alexandre–Gui Pingré’s ship met a damaged French supply vessel that had been attacked by the British. Packed to the brim with provisions...
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Out of Diaries: 3 June 1769
On 3 June 1769, as one location after another emerged from night to day, astronomers and amateurs across the world braced themselves. It was the last transit that any of them would ever be able to...
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Transit at Kitt Peak, AZ
Just a quick transit report from the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Wow, what a day it was. I had come from Washington DC to Tucson on the day before – so we only had to drive from Tucson...
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