Indian astronomy and the transits of Venus. 1: The early observations

Abstract

This paper, the first of two, is about sightings and astronomical observations of transits of Venus across the disk of the Sun made from the Indian region. The period covered in this first paper is from ancient times up to and including the 1769 transit. The sources of the information presented here range from some classical texts and historiographies to publications and records of institutions, and accounts by individuals. Of particular interest is the 1761 transit, which was observed from atop the Governor's house in Madras by the Reverend William Hirst, who made a significant observation. During ingress he noticed a nebulosity about the planet, which he attributed to the atmosphere of Venus, and this was duly recorded in his paper reporting the transit observation that appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. However, in a recent analysis, Pasachoff and Sheehan (2012) have shown that it was not the Cytherian atmosphere that Hirst and other astronomers observed in 1761.