Jeremiah Horrocks Cont.

Well known as the "father of British Astronomy", Jeremiah Horrocks, an esteemed astronomer accredited with the discovery of the transit of Venus, received his first telescope almost 30 years after the Dutch invention. Interestingly enough, Horrocks was also a noted poet.

Divine the hand which to Urania's power
Triumphant raised the trophy, which on man
Hath first bestowed the wondrous tube by art
Invented, and in noble daring taught
His mortal eyes to scan the furthest heavens.

The poem above reflects his admiration for the invention of the telescope and its uses in society to further the worldly knowledge of the universe. Despite his extensive education at Cambridge, Horrocks used his gift at home where he studied astronomy and truly made something of himself. 

It seemed as though everything about Horrocks was contradictory. He was a scientist and an artist, he had an extensive education but applied his knowledge outside the confines of the University, yet the most pertinent of his contradictory actions was his very distinct Puritan belief system greatly opposed his agreement with Ptolemy's heliocentric model of the universe. It was from all of these contradictions that Horrocks grew passionate about science and astronomy. He used Newtonian Calculus as well as other applied theories created by noted astronomers to calculate that the sun was in fact 60 million miles away from the Earth. Granted this was off by a factor of about 30 million miles, he still had the closest estimation thus far in the field of astronomy.

This lead to the "Horricks's Law" which stated that because of the massive expanse between the sun and each planet, along with relative size, all planets should appear the same size when viewed from the surface of the sun.