Author(s): Peter Aughton

Non-Fiction

There 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. Like John Harrison, the clockmaker who solved the problem of Longitude, Horrocks was a man ahead of his time. In 1639 he was the first person to see the image of Venus on the face of the Sun. He appreciated the true scale of the solar system, charted the positions of the planets more accurately than ever before, and formulated a valid theory for the wanderings of the moon. In the period before the English Civil War, he was considered the greatest astronomer in the kingdom. He died at a tragically early age but his legacy to science is remarkable.