Page - 136 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 3136 observations were made at sixty-seven different places. The results being un- satisfactory, by 1769 the number of observational posts increased to seventy- eight, producing at least 154 individual observation sets.6 More will be said about the reasons why and the complex ways in which the eighteenth-century Venus transit enterprise so faithfully reflected emerging notions about the simultaneously competitive and collaborative nature of sci- entific knowledge production in particular and social interaction in general in Chapters 5 and 6, dedicated to the Arctic expedition led by Hell in 1769. Here, it suffices to recognize that in a good measure thanks to the vast geographic spread (including exotic locations), a substantial part of the literature focuses on the historical significance of a particular expedition, region, or country.7 etc. are provided by, among others, Harry Woolf’s standard The Transits of Venus as well as several more recent surveys, in no small measure occasioned by the 2004 transit. See Eli Maor,Venus in Transit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004 [2000]); David Sellers, The Transit of Venus: The Quest to Find the True Distance of the Sun (Leeds: MegaVelda Press, 2001); Christophe Marlot, Les passages de Vénus: Histoire et observation d’un phénomène as- tronomique (Paris: Vuibert/Adept, 2004); Jean Eudes Arlot and Jean-Pierre Luminet, Le pas- sage de Vénus (Les Ulis: edp Sciences Editions, 2004); William Sheehan and John Westfall, The Transits of Venus (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2004). Several proceedings of interna- tional conferences contain historical articles on the transits of Venus. Gotha in 1998: Peter Brosche et al., eds., The Message of the Angles: Astrometry from 1798 to 1998, Acta Historica Astronomiae 3 (Frankfurt: Harri Deutsch, 1998); Lancashire in 2004: Kurtz, Proceedings; Ob- servatoire de Paris in 2004: David Aubin, ed., L’événement astronomique du siècle? Histoire sociale des passages de Vénus, 1874–1882, Cahiers François Viète 11–12 (Nantes: Cahiers Fran- çois Viète, 2007). For papers occasioned by the 2012 transit, see Journal of Astronomical Data, special issue, “Meeting Venus: A Collection of Papers Presented at the Venus Transit Confer- ence in Tromsø 2012,” ed. Christiaan Sterken and Per Pippin Aspaas, 19, no. 1. (Brussels: C. Sterken, 2013). 6 For a full list of the observation posts and the observers (as well as their instruments and sponsors) from both 1761 and 1769, see Woolf, Transits of Venus, 135–40, 182–87; supplemented by Aspaas, “Maximilianus Hell,” 211–18, 269–77. 7 Of the most-celebrated cases, on James Cook’s Tahiti expedition, see, e.g., Derek Howse and Andrew Murray, “Lieutenant Cook and the Transit of Venus, 1769,” Astronomy & Geophysics 38 (1997): 27–30; Wayne Orchiston, “James Cook’s 1769 Transit of Venus Expedition to Tahiti,” in Kurtz, Proceedings, 52–66; on Chappe d’Auteroche’s Siberia expedition, Michel Mervaud, ed., Voyage en Sibérie fait par ordre du Roi en 1761, 2 vols., Studies on Voltaire and the Eigh- teenth Century, 2004, no. 3, and 2004, no. 4 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004); on Chappe d’Auteroche’s California expedition, Doyce B. Nunis Jr., ed., The 1769 Transit of Venus: the Baja California Expedition of Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche, Vicente de Doz, and Joaquín Ve- lázquez Cárdenas de León, Baja California Travels Series 46 (Los Angeles: Natural History Mu- seum of Los Angeles County, 1982); Iris H.W. Engstrand, “The Transit of Venus in 1769: Launching Pad for European Exploration in the Pacific during the Late Eighteenth Century,” Boletin: Journal of the California Mission Studies Association 21 (2004): 36–48; on North Amer- ica, Silvio A. Bedini, “The Transit in the Tower: English Astronomical Instruments in Colonial America,” Annals of Science 54 (1997): 161–96, here 184–88; on William Wales’s (c.1734–98) expedition, Don Metz, “William Wales and the 1769 Transit of Venus: Puzzle Solving and the