Jeremiah Horrocks

Jeremiah Horrocks, who lived from 1618 to 1641, was an English astronomer, sometimes called Jeremiah Horrox, regarded as one of the founding fathers of British astronomy. Born at Lower Lodge Farm in Toxteth Park near Liverpool into a Puritan family of watchmakers, he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1632 and left in 1635 without a degree, then built his own instruments to carry on observing. He was the first to demonstrate that the Moon moves around the Earth in an elliptical orbit, anticipating Newton in suggesting the influence of the Sun on that orbit, and he correctly saw that Jupiter and Saturn disturb each other through mutual gravitation. He alone predicted the transit of Venus of 1639, which he and his friend William Crabtree were the only two people to observe and record. He died aged about twenty two, and his treatise on the transit survived the English Civil War only narrowly.