Astronomy is has a long history, but it does not get a lot of discussion on the island of Newfoundland. In a place of icebergs, puffins, and fog (lots of fog). So it never seems to have the same exposure and connections as in other places.

But, there is a lot of history and contemporary knowledges of the stars and sky from Indigenous peoples such as the Mi’kmaw, Innu, and Inuit. There is likely a lot of knowledge lost from the genocide of the Beothuk peoples over a century ago.

From a colonial perspective, astronomy was important in Newfoundland and across the Americas as a tool for measuring longitude and hence making it easier for ships to travel from Europe and support the imperialism and colonialism of the past five centuries. One particular example is that of James Cook, who charted much of the coast of the island of Newfoundland and in 1762 observed a solar eclipse on the southwest coast near the area where the town of Burgeo is. He named the little island where the observations were taken Eclipse Island.

A century later, an American expedition traveled to the northern tip of Labrador to also observe a solar eclipse. They took their observations and named the harbor where the took their observations Eclipse Harbor, even though I’m sure the region already had name.

John Winthorp from Harvard University traveled to St. John’s in 1761 to observe the Transit of Venus and was, apparently the only astronomer to do the observations in North America (http://waywiser.fas.harvard.edu/collections/618/transit-of-venus). It is not certain where in St. John’s that Winthorp and his students took the observations.

These three events illustrate a little bit about the extractive nature of colonial astronomy. What was contributed to the Newfoundland and Labrador from these events other than make colonialism easier? How did the work reflect the land or the water or the place?

Today, it seems like astronomy is not visible in this place except as an abstract concept that is not a part of here. It is something for other places and people. We may be seeing this here again, with the development of a space launch industry, but there is no aerospace education here, nor much aerospace research. It risks being colonial again as these companies dress themselves in flags and token names while whitewashing the growing links between these space companies and the defense industry.

(Image of the Sun taken on January 13 from St. John’s using the Unistellar EVSCOPE 2).