Maximilianus Hell (1720-1792) - Munin

moments, as well as the excellent methods that You have employed to meet the
lack of commodities which You were facing. Efforts have been made at our
Academy [i.e. the Académie des Sciences] to raise objections concerning the
fact that the details of your observation reached us so late, a delay which was
capable of making room for criticisms, claiming that Your lateness could make
room for suspicions that You, having had the time to receive the other
observations, could have made Your observation match theirs.
Although de Luynes did not state who had raised these allegations, and notwithstanding the
fact that he vigorously rejected them and gave the Viennese Jesuit his full support, a scientific
controversy was in the making.
II.3.4 THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE SOLAR PARALLAX, 1770-1775
In descriptions of the status of the Vardøhus data in the controversy over the solar parallax, it
is sometimes forgotten that there had been a similar controversy also in the aftermath of 1761.
The principal calculations based upon that year’s observations have been presented in Section
II.1.2 above. At one end stood Alexandre Guy Pingré, who had observed the transit from the
Cape of Good Hope in Africa. His observation was hard to reconcile with other data sets, and
besides struggles over the accuracy of his observation, Pingré had a hard time defending his
solar parallax of more ten arc seconds. At the very other end of the scale was Anders
Planman, who argued for a solar parallax of about 8.3 arc seconds.
In this situation, Father Hell opted for a preliminary parallax of about nine arc seconds, in the
Ephemerides for the year 1764. Lalande agreed completely, and used almost exactly the same
wording as Hell in the first edition of his textbook Astronomie, published in 1764. In a letter
dated 29 December 1769, Lalande reveals to Hell that 113
Monsieur Pingré was really annoyed because of the letter that you wrote to him.
He complained to me, as if I was behind it. However, it is first and foremost he
himself who is to blame for criticising in an indecent manner the observations of
Yours, which are more valuable than his own.
During the 1760s, Father Hell gradually became more self confident and disputed not only
Pingré’s parallax, but also some other works by French astronomers, as recounted in Section
113 Lalande to Hell in Vienna, dated Paris 29 December 1763 (quoted after Pinzger 1927, p. 191. Mrs Vargha’s
transcript of the same letter is inaccurate): “M. Pingré a été bien fâché de la lettre, que vous lui avés écrite, il
m’en a fait des plaintes, comme si j’en étois la cause; mais il avoit tort le premier de critiquer d’une manière
indécente vos observations, qui valent mieux, que les siennes”.
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