1769 Transit of Venus observed from Tahiti while voyaging to (unsuccessfully) observe the 1761 Transit in Sumatra. Using the solar parallax values obtained from the 1769 transit, Hornsby wrote in "Philosophical Transitions" December 1771 that "the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun (is) 93,726,900 English miles." The radar-based value used today for the astronomical unit is . This is only a difference of eight-tenths of one percent. Considering what these astronomers had to work with, their results were "absolutely remarkable". 1769 Transit of Venus observed from Tahiti On June 3, 1769, British navigator Captain James Cook, British naturalist Joseph Banks, British astronomer Charles Green and
Trouble in Tahiti Trouble in Tahiti Trouble in Tahiti is a one-act opera in seven scenes composed by Leonard Bernstein with an English libretto by the composer, dedicated to Marc Blitzstein. It is the darkest among Bernstein's "musicals", and the only one for which he wrote the words as well as the music. The opera received its first performance on 12 June 1952 at Bernstein's Festival of the Creative Arts on the campus of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts to an audience of nearly 3,000 people. The NBC Opera Theatre subsequently presented the opera on television in November 1952, a production which marked