What is "boazum"

Boazum is a Frisian village in the rural municipality of Littenseradiel, Netherlands with an approximate population of 400. It is one of the first described communities in Friesland. The Boazum church is an example of romanesque twelfth-century architecture and possesses an Ottonian fresco portraying a beardless Christ.

A famous Boazumer (although mainly by proxy) was the reverend Eelco Alta (1723-1798), whose treatise Philosophical Considerations concerning the Conjunction of the Planets Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. To be happening on the Eighth of May 1774, and about the Possible and Likely Astronomical and Physical Consequences of this Conjunction from 1774 was long said to have motivated Eise Eisinga to build his famous planetarium. According to the canonicised view, Alta stated that the upcoming conjunction of the planets with the sun would herald the apocalypse, and through his planetarium, Eisinga was able to prove that in fact, the conjunction would not take place. Modern research has however come to the more prosaic conclusion that Eisinga was mainly motivated by practical motives - most of all not having to calculate the orbits and respective positions of the planets and the sun on paper, but instead using his planetarium as a reference.