The Transit of Venus

The Transit of Venus PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140107479
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
"The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century." - The Paris Review Finalist for the National Book Award Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard's most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women--seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal--becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard's novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the eighties; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life.

The Transit of Venus

The Transit of Venus PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140107479
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
"The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century." - The Paris Review Finalist for the National Book Award Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard's most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women--seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal--becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard's novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the eighties; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life.

The Transits of Venus

The Transits of Venus PDF Author: William Sheehan
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615925473
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
In this unique and fascinating history of science, acclaimed popular science writer Sheehan and award-winning geographer Westfall take readers back through the centuries to chronicle the intrepid explorations of scientists and adventurers who studied the transits of Venus in the quest for scientific understanding. Maps & tables.

Chasing Venus

Chasing Venus PDF Author: Andrea Wulf
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307958612
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
A “thrilling adventure story" (San Francisco Chronicle) that brings to life the astronomers who in the 1700s embarked upon a quest to calculate the size of the solar system, and paints a vivid portrait of the collaborations, rivalries, and volatile international politics that hindered them at every turn. • From the author of Magnificent Rebels and New York Times bestseller The Invention of Nature. On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the Earth and the Sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system—but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and political strife, astronomers from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and the American colonies set up observatories in the remotest corners of the world, only to be thwarted by unpredictable weather and warring armies. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs; eight years later, they would have another opportunity to succeed. Thanks to these scientists, neither our conception of the universe nor the nature of scientific research would ever be the same.

The Transits of Venus

The Transits of Venus PDF Author: Harry Woolf
Publisher: Ayer Company Pub
ISBN: 9780405139598
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description


Venus in Transit

Venus in Transit PDF Author: Eli Maor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691115893
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In 2004, Venus crossed the sun's face for the first time since 1882. Some did not bother to step outside. Others planned for years, reserving tickets to see the transit in its entirety. But even this group of astronomers and experience seekers were attracted not by scientific purpose but by the event's beauty, rarity, and perhaps--after this book--history. For previous sky-watchers, though, transits afforded the only chance to determine the all-important astronomical unit: the mean distance between earth and sun. Eli Maor tells the intriguing tale of the five Venus transits previously observed and the fantastic efforts made to record them. This is a story of heroes and cowards, of reputations earned and squandered, all told against a backdrop of phenomenal geopolitical and scientific change. With a novelist's talent for the details that keep readers reading late, Maor tells the stories of how Kepler's misguided theology led him to the laws of planetary motion; of obscure Jeremiah Horrocks, who predicted the 1639 transit only to die, at age 22, a day before he was to discuss the event with the only other human known to have seen it; of the unfortunate Le Gentil, whose decade of labor was rewarded with obscuring clouds, shipwreck, and the plundering of his estate by relatives who prematurely declared him dead; of David Rittenhouse, Father of American Astronomy, who was overcome by the 1769 transit's onset and failed to record its beginning; and of Maximilian Hell, whose good name long suffered from the perusal of his transit notes by a color-blind critic. Moving beyond individual fates, Maor chronicles how governments' participation in the first international scientific effort--the observation of the 1761 transit from seventy stations, yielding a surprisingly accurate calculation of the astronomical unit using Edmund Halley's posthumous directions--intersected with the Seven Years' War, British South Seas expansion, and growing American scientific prominence. Throughout, Maor guides readers to the upcoming Venus transits in 2004 and 2012, opportunities to witness a phenomenon seen by no living person and not to be repeated until 2117.

The Future of Coptic Studies

The Future of Coptic Studies PDF Author: R MCL Wilson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004672613
Category : Religion
Languages : de
Pages : 265

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Book Description


The 1769 transit of Venus

The 1769 transit of Venus PDF Author: Doyce Blackman Nunis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description


Lal Kitab - a Rare Book on Astrology

Lal Kitab - a Rare Book on Astrology PDF Author: U. C. Mahajan
Publisher: Pustak Mahal
ISBN: 8122308848
Category : Astrology
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
The Lal Kitab, a rare book in urdu, was popular in north-west India, Pakistan, Iran and many other countries. This English version has added new dimensions to make it more lucid and easier to understand.

Transit of Venus

Transit of Venus PDF Author: Nick Lomb
Publisher: The Experiment
ISBN: 1615190554
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Traces the impact on astronomy and science of the six times that the planet Venus has passed in front of the Sun since the discovery of the telescope in the seventeenth century, and discusses the 2012 transit, the last in this century.

Transit of Venus

Transit of Venus PDF Author: Maureen Hunter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781897289136
Category : Canadian drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Obsessions and lifelong loves permeate Maureen Hunter's Transit of Venus as the eighteenth-century astronomer, Le Gentil, charts the heavens for Venus and the realm of his heart for his young fiancee. Le Gentil puts off marrying the young and wilful Celeste as he travels around the world in his attempts to plot the course of Venus across the sky, only to be undone at every turn by weather, war, and misfortune, and to find upon his final return a woman undone by his absence and ready to set her own course. Spanning eleven years in the lives of Le Gentil and Celeste, Hunter's play explores issues of faith, solitude, and the human spirit.