A life-sized figure of Captain Cook greeted us at the Reva Reva bungalow at Rohotu Fare in Bora Bora recently. We had brought along a spyglass telescope representative of Cook’s era that was then wrapped with thin rope made from local plant fibers to provide a comfortable grip. The antique telescope has excellent optics with sharp detail to the edge of the field of view and has good color correction. I have to believe that the captain, or others like him would have been delighted to have such a spyglass.
Cook also took astronomy telescopes with him on his first voyage to Tahiti, high quality instruments for observing the shadow of Venus during one of its very rare crossings of the disk of the sun. Using his and other observations at different locations across the globe, it was possible to triangulate the distance of the sun for the very first time.
How good were his observations? Though unavoidable technical difficulties limited the precision of their observations, the data was good enough to estimate the distance of the sun to within 0.8% of the true value. Not bad, not bad at all.
#captaincook #venus #telescope #transitofvenus #sun
Eskildoodle Photos and Feelings 