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History of the observations of the transits of Venus

This CD-Rom contains the fac-simile of the texts written after the voyages made during the XVIIth, XVIIIth and XIXth centuries for the observation of the transits of Venus. The navigation may be either by searching a given voyage from the general tables gathering all the information, or by following the commented and guided tour, providing in priority the most interesting of the most well-known texts.

One will find also the predictions of the transits and the canons of the transits of Mercury from 1500 to 2500ad and Venus calculated nowadays for the period -3000 to 3000ad.

 

This CD-Rom has been made under the direction of Jean-Eudes ARLOT, research director at CNRS, by Delphine MOUSSET, documentalist at Paris Observatory for the search and the gathering of the documents, by Michel TOULMONDE, University of Evry, for the writing of the commentary pages of the old texts, by Patrick ROCHER for the calculations of the canons of the transits of Mercury and Venus and by Gilles BESSOU from CeCOM, Paris Observatory for the making of the files on the CD-Rom. Comments have been translated to English by Audrey DELSANTI from Paris-Meudon Observatory.

The documents come mainly from the library of Paris Observatory, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Gallica) and from funds the list of which is available on the page "copyright and rights of use". The scanning of the documents of Paris Observatory has been made by the Arkhênum company.

The financial support of this work has been provided by Paris Observatory, the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), the Institut de mécanique céleste et de calcul des éphémérides and by the European Commission through the project VT-2004 inside the program"Science and society".

How to use this CD-rom ?

copyright and rights of use