Maximilianus Hell (1720-1792) - Munin

Venus transit expeditions were dispatched: four to the Kola Peninsula (where, in the final
event, only three sites were reached) and four to southern and eastern parts of the empire.
Rumours of these grand-scale preparations quickly spread across the Republic of Letters, and
may well have contributed – along with the preparations of Sweden – to the Danish
government‟s decision to contact Maximilianus Hell (see below).
As mentioned, the transit of Venus of 3 June 1769 was due to take place during the night in
Europe, and this fact aroused the concern of prominent members of the astronomical
community. Following the advanced age and death of Delisle (in 1768), Lalande emerged as a
key figure in the co-ordination of observations worldwide. From his point of view,
observations in the northernmost parts of the Russian Empire would be particularly valuable.
One of Lalande‟s letters to the secretary of the Russian Academy, the above-mentioned
J. A. Euler, illustrates this quite vividly (dated Paris, 17 May 1767): 45
Has the Academy of St. Petersburg really no plans to dispatch someone to
observe the transit of Venus from beyond the Arctic Circle in 1769? This would
be very important, in order to capture both the ingress and the egress.
Travelling to the High North did indeed form part of the Academy‟s plans. In a report written
by the Academy in response to Catherine‟s letter of March 1767, it was precisely the
advantages provided by the midnight sun that were stressed. 46 This explains why four of the
Venus transit expeditions in 1769 were sent to North-West Russia. Rumovskii – who had
travelled to Selenginsk in 1761 – went to the town of Kola, close to present-day Murmansk.
The plan was that Rumovskii‟s assistant, Lieutenant Fadei A. Okhtenskii, was to go to the
island of Kildin just north of Kola in the Bay of Murmansk but, as Rumovskii explains, the
ice did not melt until seven days before the transit took place, much too late for his assistant to
travel there safely and make the necessary preparations. 47 Two of the foreign participants in
the project, the Swiss astronomers Jacques-André Mallet (1740-1790) and Jean-Louis Pictet
Observatory in St. Petersburg. Having tried – and failed – to hire two of his former students for this task, he
passed the job over to Mayer (letter from Lalande to J. A. Euler, dated Paris 25 February 1769 [RAN St.
Petersburg]). According to the editor of the travel diaries of Mallet and Pictet, Jean-Daniel Candaux, not only
Bernoulli but Lalande, too, had written to Mallet and advised him to participate in the Russian Venus transit
project (Candaux 2005, p. 4) – another indication that the Academy had made it clear that they wished to recruit
foreign candidates for their expeditions as early as the summer of 1767.
45 Lalande to J. A. Euler, 17 th May 1767 (RAN St. Petersburg): “L‟academie de petersbourg ne Se propose-t-elle
point d‟envoyer quelqu‟un en 1769 au dela du Cercle polaire, pour observer le passage de venus, Cela seroit bien
important, afin d‟avoir l‟entrée et la sortie”.
46 Rumovskii 1771, pp. 8-9.
47 Rumovskii 1771, pp. 35-36.
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