Park
Harvard Yard
Historic college yard where an eighteenth-century professor once tracked Venus across the sun.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
In Harvard Yard, this guide follows astronomy professor John Winthrop's decade-long quest to observe a rare transit of Venus, from a wartime voyage to Newfoundland in 1761 to a fire that destroyed nearly every instrument at Harvard just three years before his second chance. It traces how Benjamin Franklin, then in London, helped him track down a replacement telescope in time. Astronomers around the world were chasing the same event that day, each from their own patch of ground. Stand where Winthrop set up his instruments, and look up at the same sky he watched.
This audio guide was created using AI.