Page - 96 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 296 come in his public Ephemerides, there is nothing especially noteworthy in this point of the instructions. More interesting is the next one, according to which “the public is to be urged and invited by way of published announcements or posters placed on gates to make observations of eclipses, occultations of stars, comets, and other unusual astronomical phenomena.”22 This part of the in- structions recognizes and proposes to give a further boost to the avid interest taken by European publics in celestial phenomena, especially on the rise since the invention of the telescope, and perhaps—in combination with the fifth point—also to streamline this interest. The age of the famous “Urania- Sternwarten” (Urania observatories), established with the specific aim of dis- seminating scientific knowledge and developing a much wider outreach than the Imperial Observatory of Vienna was ever expected to have,23 was of course still a matter of the future. Nevertheless, the seventeenth- and eighteenth- century press was swarming with reports about exactly the kinds of celestial events mentioned by the instruction, and in turn such events, together with the instruments and the practices of their observation, also appear to have be- come sufficiently embedded in European cultural sensibilities to provide a new semantics of objectivity, accuracy, and speed as features of journalistic work.24 Both the Wienerisches Diarium (Viennese diary) and its French coun- terpart, the Gazette de Vienne (Gazette of Vienna) reported about the observa- tions of Halley’s Comet in 1759, made at Hell’s observatory as well as that of the Jesuit collegium. At the latter site, the future emperor Joseph ii was present on at least one occasion. No other visitor is mentioned by name, nor is there any hint of an invitation for others to follow his example.25 However, throughout his career Hell regularly received less high-profile guests at the observatory, foreign diplomats and visiting students alike. His observatory was an integral part of the public space of the Austrian capital. 22 Instruction. Für dem Kaiser. Königl. Astronomen Maximilianum Hell S.J. 23 See, e.g., Gudrun Wolfschmidt, “Die Entwicklung und Verbreitung der Urania zur Popula- risierung der Astronomie,” in Konferenzbeiträge/Proceedings: Festkolloquium und Fachta- gung 250 Jahre Universitätssternwarte Wien, ed. Maria G. Firneis and Franz Kerschbaum, Communications in Asteroseismology 149 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2008), 92–103; Ole Molvig, “The Berlin Urania, Humboldtian Cosmology, and the Public,” in The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture, ed. David Aubin, Charlotte Bigg, and Otto Sibum (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 325–43. 24 Eileen Reeves, Evening News: Optics, Astronomy, and Journalism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 25 Wienerisches Diarium (hereafter: WD), May 5, May 16, and June 9, 1759; Gazette de Vienne, May 5, May 9, and May 19, 1759.