Citation Needed - 1769 Transit of Venus

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and a superior planet, becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. During a transit, Venus can be seen from Earth as a small black dot moving across the face of the Sun. The duration of such transits is usually several hours (the transit of 2012 lasted 6 hours and 40 minutes). A transit is similar to a solar eclipse by the Moon. Although the diameter of Venus is more than three times that of the Moon, Venus appears smaller and travels more slowly across the face of the Sun, because it is much farther away from Earth.

Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnik and I'll be hosting this space exploration extravaganza, but unlike the prudes at the planetarium, you can listen to this with your pants off. And speaking of pants off, I'm joined by the three men I can always count on to bail me out of jail at the Science Center, Tom, Noah, and Cecil. I mean, I guess if you count stuffing singles into your singlet as bail, then yeah, I'm there for you, buddy.

I'm only there until we renegotiate our contracts in 2027. I knew I should have read flowchart and now I learned my lesson. Well, now maybe someone's learned their lesson about pole dancing on the Tesla coil, Eli, huh? I thought it would make my pubic hair stand out all cool. It was just, I just had a heart attack. Anyways, before we begin tonight, I'd like to thank our patrons. Patrons, without you, no one would have to talk

about space stuff the old fashioned way by forcing it on teenagers who were buying acid from him at a concert. Thanks to you, the world is the sweaty, half-listening teenager to his story that dances all across the sky. And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us, Cecil, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today? Today we're going to be talking about the 1769 transit of Venus. Oh, I know it.

You were actually around for this story. Are you really going to give us your first-hand expertise? You're jealous because I saw Halle's comment and you didn't. That's fair. So what is the transit of Venus? It's like a tiny little eclipse that happens when Venus passes directly between the Earth and the Sun. And when that occurs, provided you have the right instruments

and shit, you can actually watch the tiny little dot of Venus as it slowly traverses the Sun. But because Earth and Venus orbit on different planes, it's a really rare phenomenon. Transits happen in pairs eight years apart with more than a century in between. So like the last pair of trance that's happened in 2004 and 2012, the next pair will happen in 2117 and 2125.

All right. Well, unless they make that kidney shot for cats for humans, I have a hunch I'm going to miss that one. So what's important about the one in 1769? Well, that was the one we used to measure the size of the universe. So the first person to ever predict a transitive venus was famed German astronomer Johannes Kepler. Using observations from Tico Brahe, see episode 20 of this show, Kepler was able to predict a transitive venus in November of 1631, though he would die before he could confirm that prediction.

though he would die before he could confirm that prediction. But other astronomers took up his work and though nobody actually saw that, when they did catch the second one, the 1639 one, which was the other one in the pair. And for the first time, scientists were able to look through fogged glass telescopes and see the tiny dot of Venus meandering across the great disc of the Sun. And then they had to look away and frantically blink the bright spots out of their vision. And I, well, I either saw Venus pass in front of the sun, or possibly it was a small bug crawling across my telescope last night. Either way, I'm blind, so worth it. Yeah, the last thing I saw was a good thing, at least. Yeah, so, but Templar gave us a lot more than a sweet date for some unique sun gazing.

He also gave us his laws of planetary motion. And using those, we were able to determine the relative distance of all the known planets in the solar system. So a bunch of numbery guys did exactly that, and they'd measured out the whole solar system in terms of astronomical units, or AU. That is the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

So we knew that Jupiter was five times as far from the Sun as Earth or five AU. We knew that Saturn was nine and a half AU from the Sun. We knew, therefore, that Jupiter's orbit was four and a half AU from Saturn. All that kind of shit. What we didn't know was how long an AU was. I mean, it depends. Is it aw man or aw shit? I'm sorry, I'm useless this episode. I'm really just gonna chime in with garbage like that. I'm so sorry. What are you gonna do?

You don't even know what the unit of measurement is that you're using to, this feels like cheating at measuring stuff. Right. And I'm taking notes. I'm gonna take notes. Yeah. So, okay. So fast forward to early in the 1700s and we get famed comet namesake Edmund Halley. He realized that one could theoretically use the transit of Venus as a way to measure

the astronomical unit. So, the idea is to use the parallax method. So, you know how you're like you'll be laying in bed and if you close one eye, the pillow is really low, and you can see the whole lamp, but then you switch eyes, and the pillow is way too far up there, and you can only see the top of the lamp? Well, if you're numbery enough, and you know the distance between your two eyes, you could actually use the difference in height of the pillow between the two of them to calculate the distance to both the pillow and the lamp. In this instance, Venus is the pillow, the sun is the lamp,

and the eyeballs would be astronomers positioned at various points across the globe. Noah, can I just say, as the resident stupid person on the podcast, that's the closest I was ever going to get to understanding the parallax method. Well done. Well done. Thank you. I forgot it. To be clear, this would not Done. Thank you. I forgot it. All right. To be clear, this would not be easy to do. Right?

So, first of all, you can't just take the measurements from any old wear. To get accurate measurements, you have to get your eyeballs as far apart as possible. A thousand astronomers in Europe, all of you are taking extremely accurate measurements. That wouldn't be enough. You need your observers in the far frozen north and for Edmund Halley at the time anyway, the much farther and largely unexplored by Europeans south. And to get the measurements you'd need, the observer would have to be in a place where you can observe the whole transit. That's an event that takes upwards of six hours. And the important measurements here are the instant Venus enters the Sun's disc and the instant it leaves. And so,

of course, the Sun with its bad habit of being on the other side of the planet half the time isn't going to cooperate wherever you are. So you've got to find spots where the Sun would be up and preferably high in the sky during that whole six hour period. This is the science equivalent of like when some Mormon missionaries get sent to Hawaii and some get sent to Uganda. Isn't it? Right? It's just waiting.

Yep. I'm sorry. No, this is complicated and dumb. I just Googled it. It came right up. I don't know. Why didn't they just Google this? Yeah. Why didn't they just Google it?

Just took me like a second. So they hadn't either these sites. They've never even heard of you two, right? Just dumb. They're dumb. It's worse than just that because this is the 17th fucking hundreds. And you can't exactly hop aboard a plane or a cruise ship and have them drop you and your many hundreds of pounds

of delicate scientific equipment on such and such beach, right? And you also can't show up day of because you need to make a pretty healthy number of astronomical observations beforehand, just to know precisely where on the planet you are. That seems easy nowadays, but that was actually pretty hard to nail down in the pre GPS days.

And to know for sure, precisely, you generally have to observe something like a lunar eclipse or a transit of Mercury from that location. No, no, seriously, we should have invented Google first. That's what we did. We should have invented. And then we could have skipped all this tedious shit. Everyone is stupid but me. Vote Maga.

If we had invented TV first radio, it would have been much easier. Yes, I get it. So, OK. So what you need then is observers in the remotest parts of the known and unknown world with incredibly expensive and precise equipment for at least several weeks. And you need to make this all happen at a time when it takes three months to get a letter from Philadelphia to London. And of course, you'd need lots of observers at all the various latitudes, because as anybody who's ever tried to observe a fucking eclipse with me knows, all it takes is one inconvenient cloud to fuck up your trip and leave you in a spot where you went to some backwater hell a hole like ill a goddamn noy for nothing. No, I think how fucking boring your story would be if you actually saw that eclipse. 17 days ago, huh?

See, so I know the answer. It's 17 EUs or Etruscan units, I believe they're called. Okay. And the Etruscan unit, by the way, that's measured as the distance between one Etruscan reference and the door to our studio. I was gonna say it's been a long time, but I brought up Puscany in the last episode.

Yeah, it's the way out of my way I brought up Puskany in the last time. Yeah, it went out of my way. I'll show you where it ends. So in 1716, Halley publishes a paper explaining his idea. He calculated that the next pair of transits would be in 1761 and 1769. More than 40 years has, and Halley at this point is like 60 years old. So no way in hell he's going to be around to see it. But he implores the scientific community not to waste the opportunity and to work together to try to make these observations and finally measure the universe. He closes the paper saying, quote, I recommend it therefore again and again to those curious astronomers who, when I am dead,

will have an opportunity of observing these things that they remember my admonition and diligently apply themselves with all imaginable success in the first place that they remember my admonition and diligently apply themselves with all imaginable success in the first place that they may not by the unreasonable obscurity of a cloudy sky be deprived of this most desirable sight. Jesus Christ, Ali, why don't you twist a fucking knife? And then that having ascertained with more exactness the magnitudes of the planetary orbits, it might drown to their immortal glory. But as long as you can have a steak, I guess it's all worth it. Am I right? Yeah, right.

Now, I don't think by rid down to their immortal glory, he meant get your own episode on Citation needed, but technically he was right. Or someone could invent a laser telescope and make getting malaria in the exact center of the jungle totally meaningless. Yes, you know, luckily that won't happen. He built and shit the wrong order, yeah. Now, in the utopia days, a scientific cooperation that gave us shit like the International Space Station, Cephasot 286, or the Large Hadron Collider, Cepisod 347. It's easy to underestimate what Halley was suggesting here. There was literally no possible way to do this without it being an international effort, and there was no such goddamn thing as an international

effort at that point. If two or more nations were getting together on something, it was crushing some other smaller country. The very concept of an international scientific expedition was unheard of back then, but that's what Halley was suggesting. And when he suggested it, he presented his paper in Latin in order to make sure that the most possible, like international scientists could read it.

So now ultimately, despite all the obstacles, major scientific organizations of the day, most notably the French Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society in London, they set out to make good on Halley's suggestion. They even laid the groundwork for some joint ventures and information sharing, which matters a lot, right? Because one of the things that makes this such a cooperative effort is that no one observation is worth a damn thing without all the others. So as the years slowly take ahead There are increasingly concrete plans for French and British astronomers to cooperate in observing the transit of 1761 and

Then war breaks out between France and England. Ah a lot of scientific correspondence starting with hey So now this would be the seven years war, or is it better known in America, the French and Indian War? This is basically a conflict between two of the world's largest colonial powers about who could have the last 18 acres of arable land that wasn't already colonized, and the war played out in those colonies and on the high seas. Precisely the two places that any scientific expedition to remote location kind of needed to peacefully pass through. Needless to say, cooperation didn't turn out to be great. Now the one thing that the scientists really had going for them was funding. So this whole

ordeal was going to be incredibly expensive, but governments were by and large willing to pay for it. One reason was sort of the space race type of pride associated with it. Most countries wanted to be able to say that they were pivotal in advancing human knowledge. I didn't sit around and let some other motherfuckers soak up all that citation needed episode glory. The other and far more motivating reason was for commerce. The world wasn't very well mapped at the time. Part of what the astronomers would need to do is figure out exactly where they were in the world. They'd have to survey multiple areas and make extremely accurate measurements along the way. They'd have to, in other words, improve the hell out of the maps used by countries increasingly dependent on seaborne trade.

So both the British and the French government were happy to pour money into the deal. But as easy as the funding was to find, far harder to find were the astronomers. See, at this point in history, astronomers are pretty much exclusively landed gentry that wanted an excuse not to wake up before noon. We're talking about people who are by and large fat and pampered, and these motherfuckers are being asked to go on the high seas for weeks or even months at a time, then set up shop in remote areas with very few creature comforts, and then live for weeks or months in either the frozen north or the malarial south. So the Royal Society and the Academy weren't

exactly flooded with qualified applicants. But eventually, through an incredible effort, both organizations as well as a few other countries eager to get in on all the scientific citation-needed episode glory, were able to mount several expeditions. Hundreds of astronomers were dispatched to dozens of exotic locales to measure the transit of 1761, and given that the episode is named after the transit of 1769, you kind of already have an idea what a great job they did. All right, well, knowing the failures of space nerds, we're about to hear about them slamming their telescopes into the surface of Mars. But before we do, we'll take a quick break for what we call, At the Poe of Nothing. Professor Wiggins? Hello?

Yes, yes, I'm down here in the archive. Yes, I'm, I'm, what'll be Horne's worth from the... One second, I'll be right there, just, here we go. One second. Up the stairs. OK. Yeah. How can I help? Right. Yes. You see, I'm Bar to be Hornsworth. See, from the university.

Are you all right? Yep. There's a little winded. There's a little winded from the stairs. Right. Winded from the stairs. Yeah, I see that. Anyway, we were hoping, see that you might... Sorry. Little light little lightheaded you mind if I sit down. No, no, of course not by all Which is I'm sorry. Would you be so kind as to hand me?

Just a water glass and the jug. Yes, of course. Thank you. Oh my god. Oh Oh, oh, I drank too fast. No. No, I'm fine. I am fine. Is this perhaps a bad time? No, no, I'm good. It's just that. Oh, it's a lot of stairs. It's like seven stairs. How can I help? Oh, yeah, see, I was wondering if you wanted to go to the jungle, you see, for a couple of months to look through a telescope in the jungle Hmm

Are there any stairs? I mean no, that's Nice then I shall do it. Oh, I'm gonna be held. I'm going to faint now. I see And we're back. When we left off, Noah was suggesting we all go for a hike before the live show. What happened to that? It would be lovely. All right. so obviously there are dozens of different expeditions going on here, so we can't talk about all of them, but there are a few that I thought I could highlight to give you an idea of the difficulties that all of the scientists were facing. Yeah, if the whole expedition is astronomers,

though, who's going to dump their books? Turns out the people who are driving the boats mostly, yeah. So one of my favorites is French astronomer Jean-Baptiste Diderotche, who was sent to the Russian town of Tupolsk on an overland journey to the far north. He had to go in the dead of winter. His caravan actually traveled on frozen rivers most of the time because that was the easiest way to avoid being ambushed by wolves. Holy shit! What? Right?

And Diderosh was a spoiled fucking cat, so he's doing science the whole way and he's writing about it in his journals, but he's miserable and pitchy about everything and included in his observations like local flora and fauna. He also recorded information on the average hemlines of peasant women and his personal assessment of how hot they were. Oh man, I love no matter how far we advance as a society. This one horny, gross guy is going to forever have burned a smash or pass into the science. Right.

I knew Zuck stole the whole hot or not thing, but I had no idea that Facebook's prequel was this much of a deep cut. Right. Birth of science type shit. Anyway, so he pushes through this treacherous journey, barely makes it through where he's going before the river's gone, make the whole area unreachable. He sets up shop, he starts building his observatory. And there's an unusually high amount of flooding that spring, which A, makes it really hard to build a fucking observatory in the middle of nowhere. But more importantly, B, makes the local peasants suspect that this strange foreigner who just showed up with

strange equipment was actually an evil wizard who had cursed the area with foul weather. And they got so mad that the czar had like, post a contingent of Cossack soldiers there to protect Diderotianist telescopes. Okay, but your Highness, if he's not transmogrifying people, then how come he keeps saying who is a hotty and who is a naughty? And honestly, if you were making a movie about the endeavor, I feel like the expedition that you'd use as your comic relief would be Royal Society astronomers Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason. Yes, that Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason. They were tasked by the Royal Society with observing the eclipse from Sumatra. So they set off from England and less than 24

hours after they left port, their ship is attacked and boarded by the French. The astronomers hunkered down deep in the bowels of the ship and ultimately the British won the battle, drove the French off. But not before 11 British sailors died and 37 were wounded so the ship has to go to port to get repaired and shit so these two immediately send a letter back to the Royal Society going um actually you know where would be an even better spot to observe the eclipse than Sumatra would be wherever the fuck it is we just wound up they get a letter back to say sorry guys we're ending the work from home program. You're expected back to the office.

They did see so they got this. So they wanted to stay put to the point where the Royal Society had to threaten to sue them for breach of contract. They're back in a fucking boat. That's amazing. They made it as far as Cape Town, South Africa, which was a Dutch colony at the time. And they sent an email like another, maybe this is part of kind of a letter. I love this so fucking much. They timed it such that if the Royal Society wrote them back,

the message wouldn't get there in time for them to still get the Samatra. That's so great. So they ended up just that ended up being their destination. Hey, I know we calculated precisely where we would need to stand and shit, take our super-duper precise nerd measurements, but turns out there's no holiday in express at the Sumatra yet, so I'm just going to not carry the floor and decide we arrived at our destination. That's exactly it. Now, incidentally, despite accusations of cowardice at the time and all

this shit, of all the various British expeditions that they sent out, theirs were the most accurate and the best recorded measurements. Like, the 1761 expedition as a whole was a failure, but they actually crushed it. The Royal Society was so impressed with their work that when a fight broke out between two of their American colonies about where their shared border should be They'd send Mason and Dixon to settle the dispute Establishing the Mason Dixon line that would later separate free from slave states. Oh, you're gonna name the border of Racism after us. Wow Do you know what else is great, though, is those little those little

trophy. We would love. Instead, but the most famous of the 1761 expeditions was that a French astronomer Guillaume Joseph Hyas and the Jean-Baptiste legend till Dilla Gallus. Sure. Yeah. Go again. Galice. Sure. Yeah. Yes, that is one guy.

How did that go again? Just a game. How did he catch it? Yeah, no. I was here. I just hit it a little bit. I was like, did he say, no, it went no. That's how it went.

You can hit the back 30 seconds, but no, you won. So it's recorded. Oh, but the Swedish volcano, you'll learn. I get it. Hey, Ophelia, you'll get it. No, that one, I'll take care of. So, Luscious Tiel was said by the French Academy to ponder chair.

That was at his home, man. That was a colonial port on the east coast of India. But when he got there, turned out to the British, had laid siege to it, because there's a war going on. Now, eventually, the port would fall to the British. He would have to hop from ship to ship to ship, trying to find somewhere that he could go to make his observations. Ultimately, he'd have to make those observations from a ship, bobbing up somewhere that he could go to make his observations. Ultimately, he'd have to make those observations from a ship bobbing up and down at some unknown point in the Indian Ocean.

We'll put a pin in his story, but I used to say, it doesn't get easier on him from there. Look, buddy, I realize you were standing on two buoys in the middle of the ocean, but somewhere up there isn't a measurement, okay? That's not a measurement. And we really appreciate your extensive journaling to let us know that you had diarrhea 100% of the time,

but we don't need all these papers. Like I just... Now suffice to say, once all these observations were put together, the final result was disappointing. I mean, some of the ventures got decent measurements, but a lot of them didn't, and there was more wrong with the observations than just them not being consistent. See, unbeknownst to the astronomers of the day, Venus has an atmosphere. And what that means is that the transition into the Sun's disk isn't as discreet as Edmund Halley had envisioned.

There's this thing that's since been named the Black Drop Effect, where it kind of looks like the Sun reaches out a bit and grabs the planet once you're lensing through the atmosphere and as the atmosphere drags along it looks like the edge of the Sun sort of gets sucked into Venus. Well, yeah, no, it's Venus and the Sun. But the end result is that the measurements which needed to be precise within a couple of seconds weren't. In several instances, astronomers who were observing from two telescopes like in the same room recorded times that were 20 or even 30 seconds different for the entry and exit times of Venus. There were also other hilarious problems, like the fact that the French and the British teams couldn't agree on one prime meridian.

He's the biggest transformer. No, he's the tenderest cut of state. You're both wrong. It's Amazon Central Warehouse, guys. Pay attention. Well, but the thing is the distance between Greenwich and Paris wasn't precisely known, so they couldn't correlate all of the data. OK, all right. Look, maybe before trying to figure out how far away the goddamn sun is,

maybe we nailed down Greenwich to Paris first. Okay. Baby steps, guys. Baby steps. Let's do baby steps instead. How far is your house, Sam? That's a good problem. Jupiter. But regardless of how it happened, the end result is a bunch of data that are yielding wildly different answers for the distance of the AU. Despite millions of dollars of investment and months and months of effort from experts, the end result was a question mark with ever so slightly smaller error bars than before. But they were going to get a second bite at this apple because remember, transits of

venus come in pairs. In what might be the latest, the subject in the title has ever shown up in a citation needed essay Scientists started gearing up for a second go for at that transit in 1769 Now in some ways this one would be much easier than the 1761 attempt For one thing the seven years war was over. It was a seven year war it's eight years between them So it doesn't matter what it started For another they had the experience of the previous expedition, and they knew about stuff like the Black Drop Effect, so they could at least somewhat account for that. But there

were a few new challenges as well. One of the biggest was that the area where you'd need to go to see it was a lot less forgiving in terms of where existing towns and ports were. For the southernmost observation, there was just a mostly unex forgiving in terms of where existing towns and ports were Right like for the southernmost observation There was just like a mostly unexplored part of the Pacific Ocean where they had to be like I'm sure we'll find an island here somewhere and plan an expedition for that island I don't even go to this store without a list man Yeah, I mean if you blindfold me and spin me around in my own front yard without a GPS, I will dive exposure within sight of my front door. That's true. Yeah, it's true. Right.

So it would be that particular expedition to like somewhere in this blue part of the map here, it would end up probably be in the most famous trip of either transit. This one was led by then-Lieutenant later captain James Cook, and they were taking the ship called the HMS Endeavour to this newly discovered island called Tahiti that was right about the longitude and latitude they were looking for. And by all accounts, they spent the whole time in Tahiti just liberally fucking the natives while desperately trying to stop them from stealing all their telescopes and shit. That same expedition would go on to some famous explorations of Australia and New Zealand, but the astronomer who made the transit measurements would die of dysentery before they made it home.

Cook is hanging out with the guy with 10 names who went to India, and then I said, another threesome? Well, I suppose, why are you crying, man? I'm just telling my own story. Right. And you're crying loud like loud Well, so but this wasn't the only person who would give his life to this effort one of the expeditions was sent to southern California which was especially difficult because that was Spanish territory at the time and the Spanish refused to believe this had anything at all to do with Messering the distance to the fucking sun and assumed it was spying. The Spanish government eventually gave permission to a British astronomer to observe from California, but he'd have to take a Spanish ship and he'd have to be accompanied by Spanish soldiers

the whole time. So, this dude, Chappy, he leads this expedition and they're running behind because they're crossing from the Atlantic to the Pacific way fucking harder back then. And of course, the transit of Venus isn't going to wait for him. So when they finally get to a spot where they can come ashore and they find a Spanish mission that's, you know, at approximately the correct place for the observation, Chappy doesn't want to hear any of his escorts,

nay saying about how everybody at that mission was actively dying of typhus. Well, in his defense, it was May though. And you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, Typhus miraculously goes away. You'll be all gone. You'll never have heard of it. I believe he said a quote,

it's going to disappear one day. It's like a miracle it will disappear. And from our shores, we, you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We'll see what happens. Nobody really knows. Actually, the guy who got everybody killed here was a better decision maker

So against the recommendations of literally everyone Chappy forced the party to spend weeks at this mission where he made his observations and of course they all died of fucking typhus It's fucking typhus. So at Chappy was able to make his observations while dying of typhus. He had to crawl back and forth through his telescope and shit. But 26 of the 28 men in his party would ultimately die for those calculations. One of the remaining two took his data and ultimately did make it back to Europe to get it tallied with everybody else's. But I think we can all agree we didn't care about the distance to the sun that bad. This guy hands in these spotted blood dappled papers. Oh, you know what we just found out?

There's this thing called the front drop effect. What a nice... What's the knife for? But my favorite story though is that of Leile, who, after failing to get any useful data in 1761, elected to just stick around in the Indian Ocean and wait for the next one. So he spent eight years improvising maps and charting islands and shit. And as the date ticked ever closer to 1769, he boarded a Spanish warship headed to the Philippines where he was going to make his observations. So he gets all set up. He does all his preliminary

observations and ship figures out exactly where in the world he is. Then he gets word that the Academy wants him back in Pondicherry, the very place that he couldn't land back in 1761. But it's French again, so they all, they get him to go over there. So he gets over there, he sets up shop again, he calibrates his equipment again, he does his preliminary observations again, he gets set for the big day, and then he wakes up and it's fucking cloudy. Because he's got exactly my luck with astronomical events. And just in case there was no, like, insult to go with this injury, observers in Manila, where he just left, got a great view of the transit, not a cloud in the fucking sky

Then the legend deal he heads home, but along the way he gets really sick He almost dies he has to convalescent Africa for months and while he's convalescing his heirs have him declared dead And then they did Fun fact this nine years was the longest consecutive playing of the Benny Hill theme And to be fair Heath and I did do the same thing when Noah had his heart attack last year. Awkward Christmas. He had to tell us what we got to keep instead of giving us presents. It was really... Yeah, it was weird. It was weird.

Snippy. Anyway, so 11 years after he left, Lechateau eventually makes it back to France. He has to sue everybody to get like his house in shit. And presumably at this point, somebody comes up to him and they go, hey man, we did figure out the AU while you were gone. It's about 93 million miles. And then, though this part doesn't make it into the historical record, he no doubt beat that person to death with a telescope.

And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, no illusions, what would it be? No matter what happens in April, at least somebody has worse astronomy luck than me. You say that now. All right. Are you ready for the quiz? I am. All right. Noah, I already knew the sun was 93 million miles away. How has this affected my life? Okay. Hey, when I hear that they might be giant song about the sun, I think to myself, oh, I knew that. B, I usually turn off that song.

Okay. Real answers. C, space exploration is very important. Secret answers C. Secret answers. All right, Noah. What other measurements did the lost lonely spaceographers invent while they were not calculating how bigly the sun was away? A, the world's first homesickness scale, which ranges from slumber party to college dorm. B, the Latin lateralization factor, or how much the one Latin-based language you learned

in school helps you speak in a country that doesn't speak that language Or see the measure of how bad your dysentery is which of course is in Bosnix Obviously we you went easy on me it is obviously see that's true That's true. Claim to fame claim to fame. All right, Noah the astronomer with dysentery did discover one important thing before he passed away. What was it? A, the copra light year. An excretion disk. C, a star shard or D. And sell a deuce. All right, as a space nerd and a poop fan, I guess in Celadus is maybe the best thing I've ever heard.

I also understood that. In Celadus, absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, Noah, you understood all the jokes about space just now, so you win. All right. Well, for that, for in Celadus alone, I think next week's essay should be Cece. All right. Well, for that, it's for Enceladus alone. I think next week's essay should be Cecil. Fantastic.

All right. Well, for Noah, Tom, and Cecil, I'm Eli Bosnik. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week. And by then, Cecil will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to Tom and Cecil on their brand new podcast, Talking Ship and Lawful Assembly. Or you can relax into the loving

podcasts that have always been there for you through thick and thin that no one I make. You want to choose that's fine just you know we've been around for like seven years no big deal and if you'd like to help keep this show going you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or give us a five-star review everywhere you can and if you'd like to get in touch with us a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or leave us a five star review everywhere you can and if you'd like to get in touch with us check out past episodes connect with us on social media or check the show notes be sure to check out citation pod.com We're here sir the exact spot the British Academy assigned for us is just up that hill.

Ugh, hill you say? Yes, just up that rise there, about 10 feet up. How long till the transit? Two weeks, sir. Alright, well, if we hurry, we might just make it. Might? I said hurry!