Page - 178 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 4178 Mediterranean, admitting that an observation on the open sea would be of little if any astronomical value.15 To be sure, there were “real” observations of the transit prepared under Dan- ish auspices, if not from Vardø, as Kratzenstein proposed, then from Trond- heim as a fairly northerly location, and Copenhagen itself. In the capital, the observation was led by Christian Horrebow (1718–76), who had inherited the post of director of the famous Rundetårn (Round tower) Observatory as well as the title Kongelig Astronom (astronomer royal) in 1753 from his father, Peder (1679–1764), who had in turn taken over the legacy of the illustrious Ole Rømer (Olaus Roemer [1644–1710])—not to speak about the entire proud tradition of astronomy in Denmark reaching back to Tycho Brahe. While the younger Hor- rebow was an able observer, he clearly lacked the strategic flair of his Swedish counterpart, Wargentin, thanks to whose efforts the Academy of Stockholm was able to distribute astronomical equipment to a total of five local acade- mies and colleges throughout the country, in addition to the observations it organized in the northern parts of Sweden and Finland.16 On June 6, 1761, prominent visitors showed up at Rundetårn only to find obsolete instruments and poor-quality clocks.17 The head of the observatory had made no attempt to apply for extra funding to acquire new instruments, or at least to repair those that were not functioning. This situation could probably have been avoided, had the royal astronomer solicited the government and emphasized the inter- national prestige involved in the project. Admittedly, Horrebow did what he could with the equipment he had. He and his staff carefully examined the path of Venus across the Sun’s disc and—at least some of them—also managed to observe the moments of egress (the ingress took place during the night and was not observable in Copenhagen). But when the data were sent to Paris, Hor- rebow forgot to reduce the observed times to Local Mean Time (lmt), a blun- der that rendered the crucial moments of contact of Venus with the limb of the Sun incorrect.18 This was despite the fact, as we learn from Horrebow’s own 15 Carsten Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern, 3 vols. (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1968 [1774–78]), 1:12–15. 16 Nordenmark, Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin, 164–81; Nordenmark, Astronomiens Historia i Sverige intill år 1800 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1959), 221–23. Sweden organized a total of twenty-one successful observations from twelve stations, eleven of them within the borders of Finland or Sweden. “Surprisingly enough the Swedes […] displace the British from the second position which one would have expected them to occupy, for the British could muster only nineteen successful observations,” Woolf comments, adding that “the displacement seems to be one of quality.” Woolf, Transits of Venus, 141. 17 Claus Thykier, Kjeld Gyldenkerne, and Per Barner Darnell, Dansk Astronomi Gennem Fire- hundrede År, 3 vols. (Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1990), 1:93; see also 2:251. 18 Thykier, Gyldenkerne, and Darnell, Dansk Astronomi Gennem Firehundrede År, 2:251.