Passage de Vénus, Mission de Santa Cruz (Patagonie), Photograph Album 1903-1962

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Passage de Vénus, Mission de Santa Cruz (Patagonie), Photograph Album 1903-1962

http://www.amphilsoc.org/mole/view?docId=ead/Mss.B.F63-ead.xml

The French Académie des Sciences organized a total of ten expeditions to observe the transit of Venus in 1882, including parties that set up in Haiti, Martinique, Mexico, Florida, Chile, and Cape Horn. The expedition to Santa Cruz on the Patagonian (Argentine) coast was led by the naval officer Georges-Ernest Fleuriais (1840-1895), director of the Cartography Department of the French Navy. Aboard the ship , Fleuriais sailed to Argentina and made observations of the transit just before Venus passed its ascending node on December 6, 1882. The 31 albumen photographs bound into the album titled "Passage de Venus 1882 -- Mission de Santa Cruz (Patagonie)" document a French astronomical expedition of that year to the Argentine coast. Rather than photographs of the transit itself, the album contains images of the members of the expedition, the crew of the , and the base camp. Only a few images contain captions (written in pencil on the mount). Volage Volage

0.25 Linear feet

American Philosophical Society

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SNAC Resource ID: 6631528

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Fleuriais, Georges-Ernest, 1840-1895.

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Transits of Venus are uncommon events, occurring only four times every 243 years, however in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these rare events were of considerable practical importance to astronomers. Precise measurements of the timing and position of the planet as it passed across the disk of the sun offered the best means available to resolve one of the classic problems in observational astronomy: the determination of the distance from the earth to the sun, Th...

Académie des sciences (France)

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