“Transits, Comets and Controversy: Early Astronomy in Tasmania”
Anglo-Australian
Observatory and
Australia Telescope National Facility
Thursday,
26 August 2004, 8:00 P.M.
Physics
Lecture Theatre 1
University
of Tasmania, Sandy Bay
Abstract:
Following
European settlement, Tasmania was slow to accept professional astronomy, and
the earliest notable progress was made by an amateur named Francis Abbott. During the 1860s and early 1870s he caused
an international storm by claiming that changes had occurred in the nebula
around Eta Carina, a view that was at odds with those held by leading British
astronomers of the day. Abbott also
discovered a major comet, actively promoted astronomy through his publications
and lectures, and was a pioneering meteorologist.
The
1874 transit of Venus was a major international event that promised to provide
a precise figure for that elusive ‘astronomical yardstick’, the Earth-Sun
distance, and it drew two U.S. teams of astronomers to Tasmania. Based in Hobart and Campbell Town, they
carried out observations of the transit, pinning their hopes on photographic
rather than naked eye observations of the event. However, this new technique and the results it produced were
clouded in controversy, and it was only towards the end of the century that the
validity of the transits method was established. But by then the damage had
been done ....
One
of those who assisted the Americans at Campbell Town was a local school teacher
named Alfred Barrett Biggs, and during the last two decades of the nineteenth
century he made a name for himself as an observational astronomer and a
populariser. To the citizens of
Launceston, he was affectionately referred to as their very own “Astronomer
Royal”!
In this lecture we will meet these astronomers and others, examine
their telescopes, share their observations, witness the exhilaration and
despair that followed the publication of their results, explore their attempts
to popularise the noblest of the sciences, discover the amazing assemblage of
transit of Venus relics left at Campbell Town, and end by reflecting on a lost
opportunity: the enigmatic Leake Bequest.
The
Speaker
Wayne
Orchiston has B.A. Honours and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Sydney, and
is currently part-time Archivist and Historian at the Australia Telescope
National Facility and a Research Associate at the Anglo-Australian Observatory
in Sydney.
His
research interests lie mainly in the history of astronomy, meteoritics, and radio
emission from chromospherically-active stars and from microquasars. He has more than 200 astronomy publications,
including the books Nautical Astronomy in New Zealand. The Voyages of James
Cook (1988) and Astronomical Instruments and Archives from the Asia-Pacific
Region (2004, co-edited by R. Stephenson, S. Débarbat and Nha Il-Seong). Two further books, both on the history of
Australian astronomy, are in active preparation.
Wayne
is Papers Editor of the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage. He is a former Secretary of IAU Commission
41 (History of Astronomy), chair of the new IAU Working Group on Historic Radio
Astronomy, and on the Committees of three other IAU Working Groups.