Horrocks Observes Transit of Venus

1639

The twenty-year-old Lancashire curate Jeremiah Horrocks, correcting Kepler's tables in his spare time, predicted and then actually observed Venus crossing the face of the sun from a darkened room in Much Hoole. He was the first human being to see the transit. Astronomy had its first serious English observer, a young genius who would die at twenty-two with most of his work unpublished.