Caption: An imaginative image of Jeremiah Horrocks (1618--1641). No images from life survived or, perhaps, ever existed.

He probably didn't really look like a werewolf. But men of his time often aspired to the Cavalier style.

Horrocks did important work on the orbit of the Moon and he and his friend William Crabtree (1610--1644) were the first persons in recorded history to observe a tansit of Venus (see Wikipedia: Transit of Venus, 1639).

At least some of the material Isaac Newton (1643--1727) studied had been developed from the work of Horrocks who had directly studied the work of Tycho and Kepler and had distilled some of their enduring essence.

Horrocks was such a brilliant fellow, one wonders what he would have done if he had NOT died young and how he would have interacted with Newton. Perhaps, he would have become "Newton". Probably not, but Horrocks had his own genius:

It is wrong to hold the most noble Science of the Stars guilty of uncertainty on account of some people's uncertain observations. Through no fault of its own it suffers these complaints which arise from the uncertainty and error NOT of the celestial motions but of human observations ...

---Jeremiah Horrocks (1618--1641).

Credit/Permission: © David Jeffery, 2013 / Own work.
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