Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Chasing Venus

Author: Andrea Wulf

Narrator: Robin Sachs

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-03-14

Publisher: Random House Audiobooks

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

On a summer's day in June 1761, astronomers all over the world cast their eyes to the sky to witness a rare astronomical event: the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. It was one of the most important collaborations of scientific history, as by racing to different points around the world and comparing results, these men hoped to unlock the key to one of the most pressing questions of the Enlightenment: the distance between the Earth and the sun, which would allow them to calculate the dimensions of our solar system. For the first time, scientists from across the globe came together - despite politics, wars, trade disputes, terrible weather, and bitter rivalry - to measure the universe.

Transits of Venus come in pairs, eight years apart - the next one will be June 2012, and won't occur again until December 2117. We will therefore be the last people for more than a century to see a phenomenon that inspired scientists from all over the world to work together for the first time in the history of mankind. A thrilling adventure story, an inspiring tale of Enlightenment science, and a hugely informative slice of intellectual history with Britain at its centre, Chasing Venus is this decade's Longitude.

Members Reviews:

Brief Narrative

Prospective buyers should know how slight this book is. The hardcover edition is 336 pages, but in the Kindle edition, about half of it is notes. Most of the text is narrative of the principal astronomical expeditions of 1761 and 1769, concentrating on the difficulty of traveling by ship, carriage, and sledge. The math and science involved are almost totally absent. Nor is there much discussion of the instruments and techniques used by the observers. You could get more science from the Wikipedia article about the transit of Venus and related articles about the astronomers and their instruments. So, although the book is well written, I can't really recommend it.

Interesting Stuff. More About the Process Than the Actual Science, Which is Nice.

With the excitement of the solar eclipse and the transit of Venus which happened earlier in 2012, I wanted to read about what it was like before light, and telephones and cameras to rally scientists around the world for a once in a lifetime event. Captain Cook ventured to the South Seas in support of this event. It's an interesting read without getting bogged down in the science of the event. More about how do you cope with wars and weather and building telescopes and sailing (no planes!) for months to some remote island and hoping that the sky is clear enough to capture the event. Really pretty amazing stuff.

Great !

Fabulous book. Brilliantly written work on 1700's astronomy, science, and politics.

Transformed by the Transit

Andrea Wulf has done it again - she has taken technical, historical scientific material and transformed it into a real page-turner. The author weaves a tale of an eighteenth century race against time and weather to observe and measure the rarely seen phenomenon - the transit of Venus.