Father Hell

Father Maximilian Hell had received an offer he couldn’t refuse. King Christian VII of Denmark and Norway had invited him to lead an expedition to observe a transit of Venus across the Sun in 1769. Hell had already declined a couple of other offers. But this one was too good to pass up. So he began preparing for one of his top accomplishments – and biggest controversies.
Hell was born 300 years ago today, in modern-day Hungary. His father was chief engineer for the local mines, so science and math were a constant part of his upbringing. After he joined the Jesuit order, the queen of Austria and Hungary appointed him astronomer royal. He built a new observatory, in Vienna, and directed it for most of the rest of his life.
His transit expedition took him to a small island off the coast of Norway. He took three telescopes, two clocks, and a raft of other instruments. The goal was to measure the timing of Venus’s passage across the Sun. By combining observations from different locations on