Page - 111 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

111Enlightened and Jesuit Networks, and a New Node of Science institutions published local observation results separately. By contrast, soon after its first appearance Hell’s Ephemerides grew into a real switchboard for communicating information on astronomical observations carried out at an expanding—and changing—range of locations in and around Vienna, in the Habsburg monarchy, in Europe, and in the wider world. In this way, Hell uniquely shaped his almanac as a contribution to building a “total archive en- compassing all celestial phenomena” not merely in chronological but also spa- tial terms, capturing not only the succession of stellar constellations in a given temporal unit (a calendar year) but also as many as possible of the major celes- tial events as observed at locations spread across the globe.62 Observation re- ports were already included in the second (1758) volume of the Ephemerides, published in 1757, for the time being still confined to giving an account of Hell’s own activity at the university observatory in Vienna. This remained the standard—but in an expanding number of entries and at ever-greater length—until 1761. By that year, when Hell also published in the Ephemerides a detailed forecast of and instructions for the “singular phenom- enon” of the transit of Venus before the Sun expected for June 5, the size of the appendix containing the observation reports grew threefold (thirty entries and ninety-two pages—compared to ten entries and twenty-eight pages in 1758). It also included accounts of work by others in Vienna: the “Abbé Lysogorski,” and the amateur astronomer “Mr. Caspar Sambach, a painter of this famous city” who carried out observations (“instructed in my method, explained slightly earlier to him”) on the top of his own house in the suburb of Spittelberg.63 The real watershed was the 1762 volume, including a comprehensive overview of observations of the transit of Venus that took place on June 5, 1761. Transit ob- servation data were included from France (the Paris observatories), England (Greenwich), Spain (Madrid), Italy (Bologna, Rome, Padua, Florence), Germa- ny (Ingolstadt, Munich, Würzburg, Schwetzingen, Dillingen, Göttingen, Dres- den), the Habsburg monarchy (Ljubljana [Labacum, Laibach], Trnava), Poland (Poznań [Posnania, Posen]), Sweden (Stockholm), and “Muscovy” (St. Peters- burg). The data are followed by a summary table providing the names of the 62 For the notion of astronomical observations and almanacs as an “archive,” see Florence Hsia, “Astronomy after the Deluge,” in Science in the Archive: Pasts, Presents, Futures, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 17–37. 63 Ephemerides anni 1761 ad meridianum Vindobonensem jussu Augustorum calculis definitae a Maximilian Hell, è S.J. caesaro-regio astronomo, et mechanices experiment: Prof. public. et ordin. (Vienna: Trattner, 1760), 178. The annals will be referred to hereafter as Hell, Ephe- merides Year Covered (Year Published). Unless explicitly stated, page numbers refer to the separate pagination of the appendices, not the almanac part of each volume. On Lysogor- ski and Sambach, see below, 122 and 148–49.