Maureen Hunter is a Canadian playwright who lives on the Salish Sea at Sechelt, BC. Hunter was born in Indian Head, Saskatchewan and graduated from the University of Saskatchewan. Throughout her professional career, she lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Most of her plays were premiered by the Royal Manitoba Theatre Company. They have been performed in theatres across Canada, as well as in the U.S. and Britain. Transit of Venus was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company and recorded by the BBC. An opera version of Transit of Venus premiered at Manitoba Opera in 2007. Her plays have been published by Scirocco Drama and Nuage Editions and are available through good bookstores and on Amazon. She is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.
The year 1769 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
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 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. 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.
Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisière was a French astronomer who discovered several nebulae and was appointed to the Royal Academy of Sciences. He made unsuccessful attempts to observe the 1761 and 1769 transits of Venus from India.
A Transit of Venus occurs when the planet Venus passes between the Sun and the Earth, as it happened in:
Joseph-Nicolas Delisle was a French astronomer and cartographer. Delisle is mostly known for the Delisle scale, a temperature scale he invented in 1732.
Manitoba Opera is an opera company in Winnipeg, Manitoba that was founded in 1969. Its first production was a concert version of Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore in 1972. Manitoba Opera is one of several western Canadian opera companies that flourished under the so-called "father of opera in Western Canada," Irving Guttman. He has been instrumental in the development of many young Canadian singers, including Winnipeg native Tracy Dahl (soprano) and Winkler's Phillip Ens (bass). Both have gone on to international careers.
Charles Green was a British astronomer, noted for his assignment by the Royal Society in 1768 to the expedition sent to the Pacific Ocean in order to observe the transit of Venus aboard James Cook's Endeavour.
Transit of Venus is an opera in three acts by Victor Davies. The English libretto is by Canadian playwright Maureen Hunter based on her play of the same name first produced at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in November 1992.
Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre (RMTC) is Canada's oldest English-language regional theatre. It was founded in 1958 by John Hirsch and Tom Hendry as an amalgamation of the Winnipeg Little Theatre and Theatre 77. The following is a chronological list of the Mainstage, Warehouse, and Regional Tour productions that have been staged since its inception.
Victor Albert Davies is a Canadian composer, pianist, and conductor, best known for his opera Transit of Venus and The Mennonite Piano Concerto.
Jeremiah Horrocks, sometimes given as Jeremiah Horrox, was an English astronomer. He was the first person to demonstrate that the Moon moved around the Earth in an elliptical orbit; and he was the only person to predict the transit of Venus of 1639, an event which he and his friend William Crabtree were the only two people to observe and record. Most remarkably, Horrocks correctly asserted that Jupiter was accelerating in its orbit while Saturn was slowing and interpreted this as due to mutual gravitational interaction, thereby demonstrating that gravity's actions were not limited to the Earth, Sun, and Moon.
William Wales was a British mathematician and astronomer who sailed on Captain Cook's second voyage of discovery, then became Master of the Royal Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
The Canadian Stage Company is based in Toronto, and is Canada's third-largest not-for-profit contemporary theatre company. Founded in 1987 with the merger of CentreStage and Toronto Free Theatre, Canadian Stage is dedicated to programming international contemporary theatre and to developing and producing Canadian works.
Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche was a French astronomer, best known for his observations of the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769.
The 1874 Transit of Venus Expedition to Campbell Island was an astronomical expedition by French scientists to observe the 9 December 1874 transit of Venus on subantarctic Campbell Island in the Southern Ocean some 600 km south of New Zealand. It was one of several such scientific expeditions from various countries sent around the world to observe the rare astronomical event.
The 1882 transit of Venus on 6 December 1882, was the second and last transit of Venus of the 19th century, the first having taken place eight years earlier in 1874. Many expeditions were sent by European powers to describe both episodes, eight by the United States Congress alone.
Passage de Vénus is a series of photographs of the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun on 9 December 1874. They were purportedly taken in Japan by the French astronomer Jules Janssen and Brazilian engineer Francisco Antônio de Almeida using Janssen's 'photographic revolver'.
George Lyon Tupman FRAS was the Chief Astronomer for the British astronomical expedition to Hawaii to observe the 1874 transit of Venus.
The following lists events that happened during 1882 in the Kingdom of Belgium.
