Watching Venus in Transit

Well that was fun! Throughout the day I've both learned about the Transit of Venus and watched it, too. Thanks to a late-night email yesterday from my brother Mark, I knew to check out this rare occurrence. (The next time it happens will be in 2117.)



There was plenty of information on the web, of course. My favorite sources started at National Geographic (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/06/120604-transit-of-venus-2012-sun-planet-hubble-space-science-how-when/), then spread to NASA for a visibility map (http://venustransit.nasa.gov/2012/transit/viewing_locations.php) and transitofvenus.nl/wp, which led me back to NASA's live video podcast - or "vodcast" - at www.ustream.tv/nasaedge (shown above). Their coverage began at 4:45 p.m. here (Central time) and continued for the 7-hour transit.

Fortunately the sky was clear and my brother had also suggested a live viewing technique. He said he had been able to see the last one, in 2004, by letting the sun shine through a reversed pair of binoculars and focusing the image on a card. Well, it worked for us, too. I was even able to share the event with a couple of my wife's piano students and the next door neighbors before the sun dropped behind the trees. Funny - it looked just like the image from the NASA video stream, with a bit less detail.

Two “morning after” observations

My favorite thing about the NASA broadcast, besides being able to actually see the little spot crossing the face of the Sun, was the in guy in the parka with a yellow ski cap. It was cold at 14,000 feet on Mauna Kea; there had even been the possibility of snow the night before the transit. He and his wife of one week were there on a honeymoon/business trip, and she had given him the cap complete with a quarter-size black dot that they moved throughout the vodcast, just like Venus traversing the Sun.

The other thing that sank in over night is a sense of the common relatively instantaneous experience we shared with humanity around the globe, and the way it connected each of us with people from an earlier time. We saw this event in a way that was very different from the way humans observed Venus’ previous transits. The history section of the transitofvenus.org website lays it out this way (with my added commentary):

1639 Transit – A Most Agreeable Spectacle (its first recorded scientific observation)

1761 & 1769 Transits – Global Expeditions (that’s when Captain James Cook sailed to Tahiti to observe it)

1874 & 1882 Transits – Age of Photography (remember, this was a technology that had not been available for the previous Transit)

2004 Transit – The Digital Era (and even so recently far fewer of us could have observed it; what a difference today's streaming video technology made in sharing the 2012 Transit)

My new friend Fabio, who recently returned home to Argentina for a few weeks of R&R, happened to be in the “No Transit Visible” part of the world (see http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/transit12.html). But through the marvel of modern technology, he, too, could observe the phenomenon. How cool is that!