The Keats of English Astronomy

Extract

The story of Jeremiah Horrocks is not perhaps as well known as it should be. He has been described with some justice as the Keats of English Astronomy. In both cases brilliant work was done followed by death at a very early age. Horrocks was probably 22 and Keats only 26 when they died. He is, of course, most famous for having been the first observer of the transit of Venus over the solar disc, after having calculated, with little to aid him, that it would transit on a certain day and time. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such transits were regarded as of great importance in order to get accurately the fundamental Astronomical distance, i.e. the distance of the earth from the sun.