Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

The last year Jupiter ran not so high but I could without much difficulty observe him within doors at a casement, but this year he has got quite above my reach, so that I have been constrained to attend him without doors. For some time had the convenience of resting my telescope on some old apple trees in an adjoining orchard, by the help of which I made a tolerable shift, but since my nephew, Dr John Sharp, after his return from Leiden, designing to bring the garden into better order, has cut them all down, I have been forced to contrive and make a large tripod, or three-legged staff, about 8 or 9 feet high, of strength sufficient to support the tube I use, which is 16 feet long, by which I can raise and turn it with little trouble, but have not yet a screw frame whereon to rest the other end, which I cannot procure here but must be forced to make. Other conveniences I propose to myself, and shall not grudge the labour and charge provided I may still retain your favour and you be pleased to impart another table for next year, without which all will be of no purpose.

Comment

Comment

More from Cudworth on Sharp’s office.

Flamsteed replies on 18 December 1703:

The ill weather and accidents hindered me from observing those eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites you saw at Horton. Pray continue your observations as oft as you have good opportunity. I shall make them myself or by my servants here, that I may have a good many, to compare them with yours and settle the differences of our meridians, which will determine a great many eminent towns about you, particularly Leeds, near which Mr. Gascoigne dwelt, and the parts of Lancashire next where Mr. Horrox and Mr. Crabtree resided.

Sharp on 12 April 1709 writes of being hindered by the cold and ailments:

[T]he truth is, the weakness of my eyes, which for some considerable time have been very sore, the disorder in my head, which I intimated formerly, for which I find yet very little relief, do render me extremely indisposed and unfit for observations; besides the extreme severity of the weather continuing to near the beginning of this month, and the inability of my declining body to endure the cold as formerly.

I have in some measure, and do intend for the future, more strictly to observe the rules you prescribe as to moderate diet and exercise, and especially in avoiding colds, which I find and doubt not by the Divine blessing will prove more effectual for maintaining health than physic, to which I have a strong aversion, and have never used but in cases of absolute necessity.

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Original

The last year Jupiter ran not so high but I could without much difficulty observe him within doors at a casement, but this year he has got quite above my reach, so that I have been constrained to attend him without doors. For some time had the convenience of resting my telescope on some old apple trees in an adjoining orchard, by the help of which I made a tolerable shift, but since my nephew, after his return from Leyden, designing to bring the garden into better order, has cut them all down, I have been forced to contrive and make a large tripod, or three-legged staff, about 8 or 9 feet high, of strength sufficient to support the tube I use, which is 16 feet long, by which I can raise and turn it with little trouble, but have not yet a screw frame whereon to rest the other end, which I cannot procure here but must be forced to make. Other conveniences I propose to myself, and shall not grudge the labour and charge provided I may still retain your favour and you be pleased to impart another table for next year, without which all will be of no purpose.

201 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Apple (7) ·
• Astronomy (6) ·
• 📌Bradford (72) ·
• Eye disease (2) ·
• Flamsteed, John (1646-1719) (4), the first Astronomer Royal, prepared a 3,000-star catalogue, Catalogus Britannicus, and a star atlas called Atlas Coelestis, made the first recorded observations of Uranus, laid the foundation stone for the Royal Greenwich Observatory ·
• Gascoigne, William (1612-1644) (2), Middleton-born astronomer, mathematician and maker of scientific instruments, inventor of the micrometer and the telescopic sight, one of a group of astronomers in the north of England who followed Johannes Kepler ·
• Jupiter (1) ·
• Lancashire (34) ·
• 📌Leeds (235) ·
• Leiden (1) ·
• 📌Little Horton (9) ·
• Sharp, Abraham (1653-1742) (6), mathematician and astronomer, assistant of John Flamsteed ·
• Telescope (2) ·

All tags.

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