"Two hundred and fifty years ago, it was not so simple a task. And yet, in 1761
and 1769, hundreds of astronomers from more than a dozen nations stationed at
more than 130 locations around the world turned their telescopes simultaneously
to the sky to observe the transit of Venus. They did so—at great peril and
against heavy odds in many cases—because they believed that the transit held
the key to one of the most pressing quests of the age: the distance between
Earth and the sun and, by extension, the size of the solar system."
Andrea Wulf in the Los Angeles Times recounts "first-ever truly global scientific project."
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