Page - 122 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 2122 bought a quadrant. Hell, for his part, helped von Ehrmans with the acquisition of the Newtonian telescope.84 There were also amateurs of more modest means, such as painter Caspar Franz Sambach (1715–95), who from 1762 onward had a career as a professor and later director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Sambach also had a reputation as an able observer. He used instruments that he himself had con- structed to make observations at various locations in Vienna, and received at least verbal support from Hell.85 Hell’s 1761 Venus transit report includes an account of Sambach and his observation, which regrettably failed because of clouds. Hell also mentions the observations of a Perillustris D[ominus] Müller (Highly illustrious Mr. Müller) in the St. Leopold district, as well as those of a Mercator quidam (anonymous merchant) in a suburb of Vienna.86 It may also be mentioned that Sambach in 1769 provided Hell with data from a solar eclipse, which helped him determine the longitude of his observatory in Vardø.87 The Venus transit report of 1761, along with the preserved correspondence of Maximilian Hell from the years 1758–61, lends some credibility to Hell’s at- tempt to portray Vienna as a city where several able amantes astronomiae (am- ateurs of astronomy) were active. He spared no effort to assist these enthusi- asts in pursuing their leisure interests. But the Vienna of the time was in the first place an emerging hub of professional astronomical research with two solid institutional bases, located within a few hundred footsteps from one an- other. If Hell’s position as a nodal astronomer is visualized as being in the pivot of a set of concentric circles, the Viennese Jesuit observatory and its staff were certainly in the innermost of those circles. 84 Maximilian Hell, “Observatio transitus Veneris ante discum Solis die 5ta Junii 1761,” in Ephemerides 1762 (1761), 62–67. Von Ehrmans’s modest observatory tower still stands on top of the old castle currently used as “Ferienschloss Wetzlas”; http://www.ferienschloss. at/ (accessed April 15, 2019). In the generation after Hell, a prominent noble astronomer was Elisabeth von Matt (1762–1814). She built a private observatory in the center of Vienna and engaged in many geodetic operations in Austria and Bohemia in the early 1800s in collaboration with Johann Tobias Bürg, adjunct at the Vienna University Observatory. See Peter Brosche and Klaralinda Ma-Kircher, “Elisabeth von Matt (1762–1814), an Enlight- ened Practitioner of Astronomy in Vienna,” Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage 13 (2010): 187–93. 85 Steinmayr, “Geschichte der Universitätssternwarte,” 282. 86 Hell, Ephemerides 1762 (1761), 20–21. 87 Maximilian Hell, Observatio transitus Veneris ante discum Solis die 3. Junii anno 1769 (Copen hagen: Giese, 1770), 33, 41.