Maximilianus Hell (1720-1792) - Munin

astronomer‟, such as Pehr Wargentin in Stockholm or Maximilianus Hell in Vienna, to pull
strings and bring amateurs of science into the fold.
As to the various observations in 1769, a few adjustments to Woolf‟s tables remain to be
made here as well. This year, Woolf tells us, fifteen individual observations were made on six
sites in Sweden and Finland. 183 The number of individual observations of the 1769 transit on
Swedish/Finnish soil has been adjusted in Table 4a. A single observer in Stockholm –
Strussenfelt – has been overlooked. Woolf has also missed the observation made by a crew of
anonymous military officials at Hven, at the site of Tycho Brahe‟s old observatory in the
sound between Sweden and Denmark. A third point to make is that there is a four-second
variation in the determination of the exterior contact at egress, as observed by the crew of
observers in Hernösand, which therefore should be counted as two individual observations,
not just as one. Thus, where Woolf speaks of a total of “151 observers from 77 stations” in
1769, there is in fact evidence of 154 individual, successful observations made from 78 sites.
Of this total, eighteen (not fifteen) observations were made from seven (not six) sites in the
countries now known as Sweden and Finland. 184
Not much remains to be adjusted as far as the observations from Danish and Norwegian soil
in 1769 are concerned. An investigation of observations preserved in manuscripts or in
newspapers aimed at the general public may be an interesting task in itself, since this would
give an idea of the general interest aroused by the Venus transits well outside professional
circles of learning. Nonetheless, such data sets do not merit insertion in the tables of
successful observations that made their way into standard publications of contemporaneous
astronomy. The only reason for including tabular corrections to Woolf‟s work is that there are
183 My counting on the basis of the table of Woolf 1959, pp. 182-187.
184 For reasons explained earlier, observations that are known to have been made from sites in Sweden and
Finland, but which failed to be published, have been omitted from the discussion here. This was the case in 1761,
when Wargentin ends his survey of observations by stating that: “Åtskillige andre Vittre Män hafva väl ock til
Kongl. Vetensk. Academ. insändt sina vid detta tilfälle gjorda Observationer, som i sig sielfve torde vara riktige
nog; men för någon ovisshet om Urets gång och rätta tiden, som härvid är så angelägen, kunna de ej med lika
säkerhet, som de föregående, nyttjas, och besparas därföre til vidare pröfning” = “Several other able men, it is
true, have also submitted to the Royal Academy of Sciences their observations made on this occasion, and these
appear to be reliable enough, but even so, because of some uncertainty concerning the running of the clock and
the true time, which is so crucial in this matter, they cannot be used with the same certainty as the preceding
ones, and will be saved for further testing” (Wargentin 1761a, p. 166). Similarly, an observation made by a
“Törnquist” at Frösön (near modern Östersund) is discussed in the correspondence between Wargentin and
Planman in the autumn of 1769, where uncertainty concerning time-keeping was also at stake (letter from
Planman to Wargentin in Stockholm, dated Åbo 17 November 1769 [CVH Stockholm]; this man is probably
identical to the surveyor Johan Törnsten, whose Frösön observation is mentioned in Lindroth 1967, vol. I.1, p.
408.
- 274 -