Get ready for the Venus Show

AWA PRESS MEDIA RELEASE

For immediate use: 6 June 2007

Get ready for the Venus Show

On 6 June 2012, people in New Zealand and many other parts of the world will be able to witness an extremely rare and breathtaking spectacle - the planet Venus passing across the bright disc of the sun.

Transits of Venus come in pairs several years apart, and then none for more than a century. The last one, on 8 June 2004, was not able to be seen in New Zealand, so, if you’re of astronomical bent, 2012 is your big chance to observe something you can tell your grandchildren about.

In recognition of this exciting event, Awa Press, a publisher rapidly making a reputation for its works of popular science, has published a fascinating collection of essays by leading historians and scientists, entitled The Transit of Venus: How a Rare Astronomical Alignment Changed the World (Awa Press, $24.99).

Today’s observers can see a transit of Venus in comfort, but in the past people risked their lives, health and sanity to do so.

From the seventeenth century, astronomers, priests, aristocrats and other sundry adventurers undertook long, perilous journeys, and underwent almost unimaginable privations.

From Lapland to Madagascar to New Zealand, these expeditions expanded the known world, and often brought the first encounters between indigenous peoples and so-called ‘civilisation’.

In one of the most momentous, Captain James Cook, on the tiny barque Endeavour, in 1769 sailed halfway around the world not only to observe the transit of Venus, but with secret instructions to find the Great Unknown Southern Continent. It was the first of the great scientific expeditions into the Pacific.

The book takes a broad sweep of history and science, starting with Te Papa geologist Hamish Campbell’s story of Zealandia - the great southern continent that Cook missed because almost all of it lies beneath the ocean.

Richard Hall, astronomer and founder of Stonehenge Aotearoa, tell how astronomical knowledge developed by ancient peoples laid the foundations of modern science. Peter Adds, head of Maori Studies at Victoria University, describes the astonishing feats of Pacific peoples who navigated thousands of kilometres across open seas in small craft, putting the lie to the idea that their journeys were accidental.

Space research scientist Duncan Steel tells of the amazing 17th and 18th century voyages of all sorts of people, from priests to aristocrats, determined to witness a transit of Venus and thereby, among other things, work out the distance of the sun from the Earth.

Historian, anthropologist and award-winning author Dame Anne Salmond writes of Cook’s historic mission to view the 1769 transit, which led to the first encounters between Tahitians, Maori and Europeans, while renowned physicist Paul Callaghan takes us to the outer fringes of the known universe, and today’s search for other life and universes.

The book’s excellent introduction is by astronomy writer Marilyn Head, well known for her Listener articles and regular ‘Night Sky’ columns in The Dominion Post.

All the essays have been adapted from an acclaimed Royal Society lecture series that was broadcast live on Radio New Zealand, and the book has been published with the support of the Charles Fleming Fund, and Astronomical Committee of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Next on Awa Press’s growing science list are North Pole, South Pole: The Quest to Understand Earth’s Magnetism by acclaimed physicist Gillian Turner, and the landmark work, The Awa Book of New Zealand Science, edited by Rebecca Priestley.

ENDS

The Transit of Venus was published May 2007 and is available from all good bookstores. RRP $24.99.

The authors are available for interviews and speaking engagements.

www.awapress.co.nz

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