The Transits of Venus [Hardcover]

William Sheehan (Author), John Westfall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2004

In this unique and fascinating history of science, acclaimed popular science writer William Sheehan - who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Science Writing - and award-winning geographer John Westfall take us back through the centuries to chronicle the intrepid explorations of scientists and adventurers who studied the transits of Venus in the quest for scientific understanding.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...a history and a guide for the future on the beauty and meaning of experiencing a transit of Venus." -- Astronomical Society of the Pacific,

"...a timely book dealing with all aspects of the phenomenon..." -- Physical Sciences Digest, February 2004

"...a tour de force not only of the history of observing Venus but much of astronomy itself..." -- Science Books & Films, October 2004

"...you would be wise to read this excellent book before the events of this summer." -- New Scientist, February 2004

"Copious notes, a comprehensive bibliography, snd a good index...a most excellent guide to a remarkable astronomical phenomenon." -- The Observatory, October 2004

"Highly recommended." -- Choice, October 2004

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (March 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591021758
• ISBN-13: 978-1591021759
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #972,844 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Such an exquisitely rare event... such a great book, April 25, 2004

By 

John Rummel (Madison, WI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Transits of Venus (Hardcover)

William Sheehan is one of very few authors whose books I purchase as soon as they're published. Though not an historian of astronomy by profession, he is among the elite few who have contributed significantly to popular writings in that genre in the last 15 years or so. In taking on the topic of the transits of Venus, Sheehan, joined in this endeavor by John Westfall, has produced a magnificent volume that any amateur historian of astronomy will surely want to read.

As with all Sheehan efforts, Transits is meticulously researched and detailed, yet written in a lively and conversational tone that is a pleasure to read. Here will be found excellent scientific background: the nature of transits, the importance of transit observations in unlocking the value of the astronomical unit, etc. More importantly, to me, is the rich treatment of the history of transit observations. From Kepler's Rudolphine tables, where the first transits of Venus were accurately predicted, to the life and times of Jeremiah Horrocks, the short-lived English astronomer who first successfully observed one in 1639, to the massive international efforts of the 18th and 19th centuries, this work is filled with detail, photos, diagrams, and immensely satisfying story-telling. Here's an example of the detail and rich prose:

"The long wait for a transit of Venus finally ended at 3:06:22.3 PM Honolulu mean time, December 8 1874, when George Tupman became the first person in 105 years to see a transit of Venus. He had two advantages that gave him a head start: the Hawaiian stations were the closest in the world to the Delislean point of earliest ingress: and he was observing with a spectroscope that allowed him to spot Venus against the sun's inner atmosphere, the chromosphere, a full 39 seconds before it touched the visible solar limb."

Sheehan and Westfall's orientation is so decidedly historical that they make a surprising omission: There is no discussion of the reason for the curious spacing of Venus transits: a pair 8 years apart, followed by a gap of either 105 or 122 years, and then another pair 8 years apart. Perhaps this discussion, about which I think many readers would be curious, was omitted because it can be somewhat technical. More likely, they simply had to make some decisions on what to include and not include based on their particular slant.

At any rate, such an omission is more than balanced by what Sheehan and Westfall do include. I was overjoyed to read such exquisite detail about the observational and photographic instruments used to observe and measure the transits of 1874 and 1882. As far as I know, Sheehan and Westfall are the first authors to offer such thorough coverage in a popular work. There are also many photographs and drawings reproduced from this pair of transits, many more than I have ever seen in print before.

The much-anticipated Venus transit of June 2004 is fast approaching. Perhaps the rarity of this event makes it so compelling to me, as I'm sure it will to others as well. I can think of no better way to prepare than to purchase and read this excellent work.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If You're Interested, Don't Miss It, October 10, 2004

By 

Timothy Haugh (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Transits of Venus (Hardcover)

On June 8, 2004, I got up well before dawn and made my way to the school where I teach in Westchester County, New York. I met the astronomy teacher there--I teach physics and math-- and we proceeded to watch what we could of the transit of Venus, the passage of the planet Venus across the face of the sun. It dawned cloudy but we did manage to see the last half-hour or so and we got a number of excellent photographs of the event. It was a great morning--a chance to see a very rare astronomical event. I don't think I'll ever forget it.

Because of my experience, when I saw this book I couldn't resist taking a look. Sheehan & Westfall do a very good job at explaining the science of the transit, detailing views of the transit in maps & photographs, and in going through the history of the attempts at viewing and measuring the transit. Particularly interesting is their discussions of using the transit to measure the earth-sun distance and the number of voyages of exploration undertaken (including Captain Cook's) whose primary purpose was to find a good vantage from which to observe the transit.

Transits of Venus come in pairs separated by approximately 8 years. These pairs are then separated from each other by better than 100 years. Before 2004, the last transit was in 1882. After the transit of 2012, the next won't occur until 2117. Granted, this book is not going to hold any interest to anyone who is not interested in astronomy. But if observing the skies is something that fascinates you as it does me, read this book. Then put it on a shelf and pull it out again in 2012. Prepare yourself for the next transit because if you miss it next time, you won't get another chance. You'll have to leave the book for your grandchildren.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Transits of Venus, August 7, 2006

By 

Frederic B. Jueneman "fragment" (Newark, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Transits of Venus (Hardcover)

William Sheehan & John Westfall

The Transits of Venus

(Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY) 2004

407 pages

ISBN 1-59102-175-8

Reviewed by Frederic Jueneman

It may be much too late for readers of this review to observe the rare transit of Venus across the disk of the Sun, which took place on June 8, 2004, unless they already had been aware of the phenomenon and made prior arrangements to view the spectacle. As it so happens, the entire transit would only be visible in much of Europe and Asia, with some of the best viewing being in--of all places--Iraq. The eastern seaboards of Asia and Australia would only see the ingress of the transit, while eastern North and South America would only see the egress. The last time this transit occurred was December 6, 1882.

But, fret not my friends, for this rare celestial alignment will occur one more time in this century on June 5-6, 2012, as the entire transit passes across the International Dateline in the mid-Pacific. It's next two appearances then won't be until December 11, 2117 and December 8, 2125.

Curiously, these transits of Venus come in doublets spaced eight years apart minus some two days (or approx. 2920 days, with the appropriate allowance for leap years). However, the long intervals in between each pair of transits alternate between 105 and 122 years. Moreover, astronomers have grouped these transits into series, and which themselves recur every 243 years. (The number `243' is interesting as it coincidentally is the retrograde rotation of Venus in days.)

But, I digress.

The story itself begins with the dilemma of parallax, an age-old problem of viewing a body from two or more positions and estimating its size and distance. The Moon was such an object that had puzzled astronomers for millennia, although in the third century BCE Aristarchus of Samos had closely estimated the Moon's size and distance based on Earth's shadow during lunar eclipses. This problem is compounded by an apparent parallax-shift of some 2° when viewed from widely separated positions on the Earth. However, it becomes even more critical when extremely small angular displacements are encountered while estimating the size and distance of other objects such as the planets and Sun, not to mention distant stars.

Kepler's Third Law states that the cube of a planet's distance from the Sun is proportional to the square of its period of revolution about the Sun. Thus, it was thought that knowing the period of revolution of Venus, an estimate of its size and distance during a transit would give an indication of our own distance from the Sun. Such Cytherean transits across the Sun can take anywhere from three to six hours, depending on the specific planetary alignments and to a great extent the geographical positions of the observers, whereas a precise timing of the crossing is critical to each observer at a given latitude and longi¬tude. Such observations would be a triumph of science over the 45 known transits of Venus over recorded history since the days of Ammisaduqua,, the penultimate king of the First Dynasty of Babylon.

In the fourth century BCE, Heraclides of Pontus, a pupil of Plato, suggested that a lot of problems would be resolved if planets as Mercury and Venus were thought as orbiting the Sun and that the earth itself rotated on its own axis, but this was swept aside as more important concerns took precedence. This idea was later taken up by Aristarchus, but rejected on religious grounds that epistemologically declared that the Earth is the center of the universe and that the planets orbit it in perfect circles. The Alexandrian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in the second century CE carried this to a fine art. Indeed, for the sake of convenience, today's astronomers often refer to a body's deferent--average orbital figure--as circular, and we ourselves speak of the Sun's literally rising and setting, although it does no such thing.

However, by the time of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, it was clearly apparent to the intelligentsia that "saving the phenomena" wasn't cutting the mustard, as traditional views and pontifical hand-waving couldn't substitute for direct observation. In 1631 French astronomer Pierre Gassendi observed the transit of Mercury and hoped to see Kepler's prediction of that of Venus later the same year, except that it was over before sunrise in Paris. The first recorded observation of a partial Venus transit was carefully but hurriedly made eight years later by the 20-year-old English as¬tronomer Jeremiah Horrocks in 1639, as the next one was not due until 1761, and in so doing was able to correct the ratio between Venus' and Earth's orbits to a value still used today, The illustrious Gassendi could also have seen it from Paris, but he was otherwise occupied and had apparently lost interest.

An alternative solution to the solar parallax problem was taken up by Giovanni Cassini and the Dane Ole Rømer at the Paris observatory by way of Mars close approach to Earth in September 1672, with a second observation post manned by the Jesuit astronomer Jean Richer in Cayenne, French Guiana, on the South American coast, finding a value of some 25 arc-seconds of displacement of the planet's image against the background of stars. From this measurement the solar parallax implied a distance from the Earth to the Sun within about eight percent of to¬day's figure.

This all occurred during a period of almost global scientific revolution in the late 17th century, when it was thought that measurements of Venus transits would underscore Isaac Newton's clockwork universe and define the absolute values of the scale of our solar system--the solar parallax itself. Edmund Halley proposed that widely separated observers time the interval between transits from ingress to egress, so that the angles of observation could more accurately define the parallax. It was a suggestion that he himself would not see in his lifetime, nor that of his prediction of the comet of 1682 now bearing his name returning in 1758.

The French astronomer Joseph-Nicholas Delisle proposed an alternative method of observing the transit of 1761 over four essential moments, by noting first contact of Venus with the Sun's limb, then when it was just within the solar disk, when it was about to leave the disk again, and when it finally separated from the Sun proper. The main difficulty with this procedure was knowing one's precise longitude, a problem alleviated by the invention of the marine chronometer by John Harrison and independently by the lesser known Pierre Le Roy and Ferdinand Berthoud.

With Europe finally settling down after a series of conflicts and other political upheavals, dozens of astronomers and their retinues scattered across the globe to witness the event, most using Delisle's methodology. However, bad weather conditions, accidents, and of course politics--the Seven Years War just broke out--daunted many observers, but there were a few preciously good sightings that made the effort seem worthwhile. Moreover, the Russian astronomer Mikhail Lomonosov was the first to discover and recognize that the haze appearing around Venus as it crossed the Sun's limb was its atmospheric envelope.

It was this selfsame haziness that hampered the accurate observations of the transit, making the exact moment of crossing indistinct and error-prone, a phenomenon which cast serious doubt on the precision of parallax determination, and by inference the uncertain masses of the other planets. Further, a dark blob appeared to attach itself to the Sun's edge as the image of Venus dissociated itself during ingress and again when leaving during egress, exacerbating the difficulty of timing the transit. Ah well, there would be the upcoming transit of 1769 when they would be better prepared to adapt and mitigate such problems with improved techniques.

It didn't happen.

Preparations for the 1874 crossing by interested countries were lackadaisical in coming, despite otherwise serious planning by the astronomers, most only a few years before the event. However, new instru¬ments and techniques were involved in the mix, such as the heliometer, spectroscope, improved chronometers, telegraphy, and the advent of photography, notably collodion film and daguerreotype. And yet, with all the technological advances, the selfsame problems of clarity and sharpness remained. The photographs upon enlargement were even fuzzier than before. The uncertainties, if anything, were compounded by the advances.

According to authors, Sheehan and Westfall, the December 1882 was "the last hurrah" for the Halley and Delisle methods. Nevertheless, it was the first time that the Americas were in the spotlight since 1639, when Harvard was merely a fledgling university, having been founded just three years prior. The disappointments of 1874 left most previous contributors to the safari-like excursions less than enthusiastic, But then again, the next transit would skip the 20th century entirely, so some forty-odd voyages were dispatched to the western hemisphere for that last hurrah.

As is normally the case, newer and more revolutionary techniques were even then being forwarded that didn't rely on transit observations to ascertain solar parallax, and hence distances to the various planetary bodies, and subsequent determination of planetary masses, including that of Earth. Celestial mechanics was in its infancy, but was making such rapid inroads in these determinations to the point where transit observations would no longer be necessary or even desirable, except perhaps as recreational exercises.

One touching story from out of the 1882 event involved David Peck Todd, his wife Mabel, and Austin... Read more ›