Venus

[Steff]

Anyone see this this morning... pretty cool.

 

 

Venus Transit of Sun Delights World Stargazers

Tue Jun 8,10:53 AM ET Add Science - Reuters to My Yahoo!

By Patricia Reaney

 

LONDON (Reuters) - Venus dazzled astronomers and stargazers around the globe Tuesday as it made it first transit across the Sun in more than 100 years.

 

Until 1:19 a.m. EDT, no living person had viewed the rare phenomenon first seen by British astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks in 1639.

 

 

From Sydney to the pyramids and western Europe, people armed for the occasion with pinhole cameras and special dark glasses gathered for the celestial show.

 

 

Venus appeared as a small black dot on the lower edge of the Sun at the start of a transit that ended about six hours later.

 

 

"We are watching the first transit of Venus since 1882," said Dr Robert Massey of Britain's Royal Observatory in Greenwich as more than 100 people thronged the courtyard of the London landmark to witness the phenomenon.

 

 

Banks of photographers with telephoto lenses and television crews captured the event. People queued patiently as parents lifted small children to gaze into telescopes set up in the courtyard of the observatory on a clear, warm morning.

 

 

Others used special glasses handed out by staff to see the event.

 

 

At Cairo's ancient pyramids, a school group viewed the rare phenomenon at the burial tombs of the civilization that many experts believe charted the stars thousands of years ago.

 

 

"The pyramids are the perfect place to watch something so rare as Venus in front of the Sun," said 15-year-old Wissam Adel Kamal, one of the about 60 students who came equipped with specially filtered glasses.

 

 

RIGHT TIME, RIGHT PLACE

 

 

Scandinavian airline SAS offered dark glasses to about 3,500 travelers on Nordic flights to witness the transit above the clouds which covered sections of northern Europe.

 

 

On the other side of the globe in Australia it was already afternoon when 40 amateur astronomers gathered at the home of Jos Roberts north of Sydney.

 

 

"I feel very privileged to be alive at the right time, to be in the right place, to have no clouds or monsoons," said Roberts who toasted the event with champagne with his colleagues.

 

 

In Lebanon, schoolchildren gathered on the hills outside Beirut to watch the passage through dark glasses.

 

 

For the Americas, however, the complete transit was only partially visible.

 

 

The Venusian transit only occurs four times every 243 years. Two are in December, eight years apart, and then 121.5 years later there are two June transits, also eight years apart. After another 105.5 years the cycle begins again.

 

 

The next passage will occur in 2012 but will not be visible in many parts of the world.

 

 

In the past, scientists calculated the distance of the Earth from the Sun, the astronomical unit (AU), from measurements of the duration of the transit of Venus made from widely separated latitudes.

 

England's Captain James Cook traveled to Tahiti on a special expedition to make observations during the 1769 transit.

 

This time, too, observers around the world will be timing the transit and repeating the historic calculations.

 

"It's the different timings (from different locations) which allow you to measure the distance (to Venus)," said John Mucklow of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa who used an old telescope mounted on a wooden tripod to watch the spectacle from the roof of a hotel near Johannesburg.

 

But Dr Robert Walsh, of the University of Central Lancashire in northern England, had arguably the best viewing position -- the bedroom in northern England where Horrocks first witnessed it so long ago.

 

"To see what he saw from a specific point is very exciting indeed," he said.

[Queen Prawn]

I didn't hear about it until this morning at about 5:30 - too late to look.

[Brian]

MY ARETNAS!!!!