The Transit of Venus: The Brief, Brilliant Life of Jeremiah Horrocks, Father of British Astronomy

This is a missing chapter in the history of astronomy, between the work of Galileo and Newton, and it is a chapter that belongs to England. Most people would name Newton and Edmund Halley as the greatest British astronomers, but both men drew heavily on the works of Jeremiah Horrocks. In the period before the English Civil War, Horrocks was the greatest astronomer in the kingdom. In 1639 he was the first man to see the image of Venus on the face of the Sun. He knew the positions and motions of the planets more accurately than any person of his time. He was the first to appreciate the true scale of the solar system and the first to formulate a valid theory for the wanderings of the moon. Yet he was not an elderly grey-bearded sage, but a young man living in provincial obscurity, who on his death had barely come of age but who left a great scientific legacy. Peter Aughton's scientific and narrative skills vividly describe the story of the early discoveries in astronomy and ably illustrate Horrocks' importance.