![]() It didn't help that the Spanish governor of Manila was kind of a crazy person. Having arrived three years before the event, he now had three years to worry and second-guess his decision. Unfortunately, the astronomer may have over-prepared. In any case, Le Gentil was in Manila with plenty of time to prepare for the next transit. I cannot answer that I would not have increased the number of persons eager to save themselves. It is true that only three or four people were drowned, those who were the most eager to save themselves, which is what almost always happens in shipwrecks. Writing in his journal, Le Gentil appears to have developed that particular sense of humor that generally accompanies constant disappointment: ![]() That he chose not to depart Manila at that time was perhaps his one stroke of good luck in the entire journey. So, when he was offered passage on a ship heading to the Mariana Islands, he quickly declined. Arriving in Manila in 1766, the astronomer found himself exhausted from months of sickness and sea-voyage. Le Gentil packed up his stuff and headed off to Manila, where he could catch another ship to get to the Mariana Islands. The Sun would be relatively high in the sky at both places when Venus passed by, meaning that the view would be through less atmosphere with a reduced chance of clouds passing through the line of sight. He calculated that either Manila or the Mariana Islands would be the ideal spot to observe. But there remained for seven or eight days in my optic nerve a singular impression from this sickness it was to see two objects in the place of one, beside each other this illusion disappeared little by little as I regained my strength.Īfter recovering from both his sickness and the treatment, Le Gentil decided to begin his preparations for the 1769 transit of Venus. He describes this illness and its "cure" in his journals: This sickness was a sort of violent stroke, of which several very copious blood-lettings made immediately on my arm and my foot, and emetic administered twelve hours afterwards, rid me of it quite quickly. And then he ate some bad kind of some kind of animal and came down with a terrible sickness. So he made a really nice map of Madagascar. ![]() Since almost all other astronomical distances were known in terms of the AU, knowing its precise value would essentially set the scale for the cosmos.īrand new telescopes in hand, the astronomers of Europe set sail for locations all over the world. Soon after the 1639 transit, Edmund Halley (he of the-only-comet-people-can-name fame) calculated that with enough simultaneous measurements, the distance from the Earth to the Sun (the so-called astronomical unit, or AU) could be measured fairly accurately. People would be ready.Īnd the stakes were higher this time, too. But the transits of 17 would be different. Though the previous transit of 1639 had been predicted, it was met with little fanfare and only a few measurements. ![]() The next pair of Venus transits was imminent and astronomers were giddy with anticipation. Le Gentil happened to get into the astronomy game at a very exciting time. However, he soon began sneaking away to hear astronomy lectures and quickly switched from studies of Heaven to those heavens more readily observed in a telescope. Monsieur Le Gentil (as his friends called him and so, then, shall we) had originally intended to enter the priesthood. He was also an astronomer, though he hadn't started out that way. Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisière was a Frenchman with an incredibly long name.
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