This thread has brought home to me, as an amateur astronomer, how great the divorce is now of people from their natural world. I'd like to write a few brief words about Jeremiah Horrocks. Born in 1617, and not at all wealthy, he went to Cambridge Uni at about 14. He became a curate near Liverpool, and being a complete amateur astronomer, set to work on his own hobby. Remember this is before the days of magazines like Sky and Telescope etc, you had to work off your own motivation and enthusiasm. Even texts were almost non existent. He gained enough self taught knowledge to disagree with Keppler, and predicted on his own that a transit of Venus would occur across the face of the sun at about 3pm on 24 November 1639. He hurried home and using his self designed card viewing system sure enough spotted the black dot of Venus moving across the face of the sun before the sun got too low in the sky. It happened only 6 times between 1600 and 2000. He died in 1641 at the age of 24! Self taught. I could only be amazed at how in touch with natural events people used to try and be under much harder circumstances than now. Now people look up and say 'why's it getting dark, Norah?' as a miraculous show of nature takes place.
PS the most recent transit of June 2004 took place on a day of miraculously clear weather over the south of England. Every moment of it was visible in marvellous sunshine and the massed telescopes of my astronomy club were set up and everybody viewing for about 5 or 6 hours. It had a brief mention on the TV news, and live coverage, but people seemed to have other things to do.