NavList:

Aha. Thank you, Wolfgang :). I should have known that Thony Christie would have written about this. Here's the direct link to his article on the play and the wild exaggerations in it (and perhaps more importantly, in the press coverage that has followed the play): Horrocks Bollocks! He apparently agrees on everything that had bothered me about the story, and he also spotted one funny historical error that got by me: the great astronomer Hevelius published the transit observations of Horrocks in 1662. That was four years before the Great Fire of London which the author of the play and the media coverage cite as one of the reasons that the work of Horrocks had been lost to history, which just wasn't true anyway.

I don't agree with everything he has written over the years, but Christie is almost always well-informed on factual matters. I also enjoyed his takedown of a ChatGPT-generated fantasy about Hypatia and the distorted history of the Library of Alexandria and all that.

Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA