A “thrilling adventure story" (San Francisco Chronicle) that brings to life the astronomers who in the 1700s embarked upon a quest to calculate the size of the solar system, and paints a vivid portrait of the collaborations, rivalries, and volatile international politics that hindered them at every turn. • From the author of Magnificent Rebels and New York Times bestseller The Invention of Nature. On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the Earth and the Sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system—but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and political strife, astronomers from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and the American colonies set up observatories in the remotest corners of the world, only to be thwarted by unpredictable weather and warring armies. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs; eight years later, they would have another opportunity to succeed. Thanks to these scientists, neither our conception of the universe nor the nature of scientific research would ever be the same.

The story of the Bounty mutiny is well known. Fletcher Christian's mutineers set Captain William Bligh and others adrift in a ship's boat. Bligh sailed some 5000 kilometres to safety; the mutineers returned to Tahiti before making their way to isolated and uninhabited Pitcairn Island. But what of the Tahitian women who joined the Bounty at Tahiti? Their powerful and compelling story is told in Transit of Venus. Mauatua and her friends and relatives speak directly to us in beautiful and startlingly perceptive ways as they move away from their homeland and pass into the feverish intensity of drunkenness, betrayal and murder that mark the early years on Pitcairn. In so doing they assert their place in a story that has fascinated readers for generations.

The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves A Penguin Classic Considered "one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century" (The Paris Review), The Transit of Venus follows Caroline and Grace Bell as they leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. From Sydney to London, New York, and Stockholm, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two sisters experience seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal. With exquisite, breathtaking prose, Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard tells the story of the displacements and absurdities of modern life. The result is at once an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a desperate love story.

In this unique and fascinating history of science, acclaimed popular science writer Sheehan and award-winning geographer Westfall take readers back through the centuries to chronicle the intrepid explorations of scientists and adventurers who studied the transits of Venus in the quest for scientific understanding. Maps & tables.

Essays reassess Cook's standing as a leading figure in eighteenth-century history, exploration and the advancement of science.

The treatise by Jeremiah Horrocks (1618-1641) on the transit of Venus of 1639 is an account of an important astronomical observation, as well as an analysis and commentary on the changing state and practice of astronomy during the significant period between the achievements of Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Isaac Newton (1642-1727). This work has, in addition, the power to delight and charm us as the record of a young astronomer’s encounter with a rare astronomical event and the manner in which he discovered, observed, and drew conclusions from it. Its appeal is heightened by the knowledge that a self-trained young man stole a march on all the astronomers of his day.

Kew Observatory was originally built in 1769 for King George III, a keen amateur astronomer, so that he could observe the transit of Venus. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was a world-leading center for four major sciences: geomagnetism, meteorology, solar physics, and standardization. Long before government cutbacks forced its closure in 1980, the observatory was run by both major bodies responsible for the management of science in Britain: first the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and then, from 1871, the Royal Society. Kew Observatory influenced and was influenced by many of the larger developments in the physical sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century, while many of the major figures involved were in some way affiliated with Kew. Lee T. Macdonald explores the extraordinary story of this important scientific institution as it rose to prominence during the Victorian era. His book offers fresh new insights into key historical issues in nineteenth-century science: the patronage of science; relations between science and government; the evolution of the observatory sciences; and the origins and early years of the National Physical Laboratory, once an extension of Kew and now the largest applied physics organization in the United Kingdom.