{"id":357,"date":"2015-10-18T18:56:04","date_gmt":"2015-10-18T18:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/pasachoff\/?page_id=357"},"modified":"2015-10-18T18:56:04","modified_gmt":"2015-10-18T18:56:04","slug":"1874-transit-of-venus","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/pasachoff\/1874-transit-of-venus\/","title":{"rendered":"1874 Transit of Venus"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

From PUNCH, or THE LONDON CHARIVARI
\nDecember 19, 1874<\/p>\n

\nTHE TRANSIT OF VENUS<\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe Transit of Venus is over:
\nA spot on the Sun for four hours,
\nThe radiant a\u00ebrial-rover
\nNow sparkles the chief of star-flowers,
\nHome troop the astronomers various,
\nAnd bring their celestial log,
\nSome rendered by sunshine hilarious,
\nSome damped by inopportune fog.
\nThey went forth in peaceful battalions,
\nThe secrets of Science to clutch,
\nAmericans, Germans, Italians,
\nWith Frenchmen and English and Dutch:
\nWhere the hardness of ice defies granite’s
\nWhere lizards the noon-day warmth ahun,
\nThey watched the most brilliant of planets
\nturn sable in crossing the Sun.
\n“Alma Venus,” exclaimeth LUCRETIUS;
\nFair Goddess, the player of many tricks,
\nOf doings fantastic, facetious,
\nThe quite inexhaustible genetrix!
\nNow binding all nations together
\nIn a scheme tele-plus-spectroscopie,
\nStar-goddess, you bring us fair weather,
\nAnd we hail you as most philantropic.
\nWhen, braving sub-tropie malaria,
\nAnd noses and fingers that freeze,
\nFrom Kerguelen to dismal Siberia
\nAstronomers sail o’er the seas,
\nFair Venus, our beautiful neighbour,
\nThrows down her distinguishing light,
\n‘Twixt the armies for Science who labour,
\nAnd the armies for conquest who fight.
\nPunch with patience waits tidings of Science,
\nBut waits, with a thirty impatience,
\nFor the time when all warlike defiance
\nWill cease among civilised nations.
\nFrom quarreling canst thou not screen us,
\nO brightest and clearest of stars,
\nAnd let the last Transit of Venus
\nBe crowned by the Exit of Mars?<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The observations of the 1874 transit of Venus from Australia by Henry Chamberlain Russell, from a book that also included a 1761 image of the black-drop effect by Thobern Bergman from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. (The wrong Russell’s name was added much later to this image).<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From PUNCH, or THE LONDON CHARIVARI December 19, 1874 THE TRANSIT OF VENUS The Transit of Venus is over: A spot on the Sun for four hours, The radiant a\u00ebrial-rover Now sparkles the chief of star-flowers, Home troop the astronomers … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":971,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-357","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/pasachoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/pasachoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/pasachoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/pasachoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/971"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/pasachoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/pasachoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":360,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/pasachoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/357\/revisions\/360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/pasachoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}