William Crabtree

William Crabtree (1610 to 1644) was an English astronomer, mathematician and merchant from Broughton in Lancashire, one of only two people to observe and record the first predicted transit of Venus in 1639. Born in the hamlet of Broughton Spout and educated at Manchester Grammar School, he married into a wealthy family, worked as a merchant in Manchester and spent his spare time on astronomy, carefully measuring planetary movements and rewriting the existing Rudolphine Tables with improved accuracy. From 1636 he corresponded with Jeremiah Horrocks, and a group of northern astronomers including William Gascoigne formed around them as Britain's first followers of Kepler, calling themselves Nos Keplari. Crabtree and Horrocks alone observed and plotted the transit of 4 December 1639 in their own homes, and Crabtree's calculations were crucial in allowing Horrocks to estimate the size of Venus and the distance from the Earth to the Sun. He made his will in July 1644 and was buried at Manchester Collegiate Church. The recording of the transit is seen by many as the birth of modern astronomy in Britain, and Ford Madox Brown painted a mural of it for Manchester Town Hall.