WOW Project, 1639

“I then beheld a most agreeable spectacle … a perfectly circular shape … [where] the limbs of the Sun and Venus precisely coincided.”—Jeremiah Horrocks
He entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, at age 13 as a poor scholar, taught himself astronomy, corrected Kepler’s calculations (how cool is that), measured the moon’s size and found its elliptical orbit, and turned in the best-to-date estimate of the earth’s distance from the sun, all before dying at age 22.