Venus to appear in once-in-a-lifetime event

On 5 and 6 June this year, millions of people around the world will be able to see Venus pass across the face of the Sun in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

It will take Venus about six hours to complete its transit, appearing as a small black dot on the Sun's surface, in an event that will not happen again until 2117.

In this month's Physics World, Jay M Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College, Massachusetts, explores the science behind Venus's transit and gives an account of its fascinating history.

Transits of Venus occur only on the very rare occasions when Venus and the Earth are in a line with the Sun. At other times Venus passes below or above the Sun because the two orbits are at a slight angle to each other. Transits occur in pairs separated by eight years, with the gap between pairs of transits alternating between 105.5 and 121.5 years – the last transit was in 2004.

Building on the original theories of Nicolaus Copernicus from 1543, scientists were able to predict and record the transits of both Mercury and Venus in the centuries that followed.

Johannes Kepler successfully predicted that both planets would transit the Sun in 1631, part of which was verified with Mercury's transit of that year. But the first transit of Venus to actually be viewed was in 1639 – an event that had been predicted by the English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks. He observed the transit in the village of Much Hoole in Lancashire – the only other person to see it being his correspondent, William Crabtree, in Manchester.

Later, in 1716, Edmond Halley proposed using a transit of Venus to predict the precise distance between the Earth and the Sun, known as the astronomical unit. As a result, hundreds of expeditions were sent all over the world to observe the 1761 and 1769 transits. A young James Cook took the Endeavour to the island of Tahiti, where he successfully observed the transit at a site that is still called Point Venus.

Pasachoff expects the transit to confirm his team's theory about the phenomenon called "the black-drop effect" – a strange, dark band linking Venus's silhouette with the sky outside the Sun that appears for about a minute starting just as Venus first enters the solar disk.

Pasachoff and his colleagues will concentrate on observing Venus's atmosphere as it appears when Venus is only half onto the solar disk. He also believes that observations of the transit will help astronomers who are looking for extrasolar planets orbiting stars other than the Sun.

"Doing so verifies that the techniques for studying events on and around other stars hold true in our own backyard. In other words, by looking up close at transits in our solar system, we may be able to see subtle effects that can help exoplanet hunters explain what they are seeing when they view distant suns," Pasachoff writes.

Not content with viewing this year's transit from Earth, scientists in France will be using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the effect of Venus's transit very slightly darkening the Moon. Pasachoff and colleagues even hope to use Hubble to watch Venus passing in front of the Sun as seen from Jupiter – an event that will take place on 20 September this year – and will be using NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which is orbiting Saturn, to see a transit of Venus from Saturn on 21 December.

"We are fortunate in that we are truly living in a golden period of planetary transits and it is one of which I hope astronomers can take full advantage," he writes.


http://phys.org/news/2012-05-venus-once ... event.html

Counting down to the Transit of Venus - our nearest exoplanet test-lab
March 5, 2012



Image showing refracted sunlight observed during the 2004 egress with the DOT telescope in La Palma. Note the changes in brightness and latitude extension of the aureole.

Three months before the last transit of Venus this century, scientists are gathering at the Observatoire de Paris to finalise their observation plans in a workshop supported by the Europlanet Research Infrastructure and the EGIDE/PHC Sakura Program.

The transit of Venus on 5-6 June 2012 will give scientists two important opportunities for science: firstly, to use Venus as an example of a transiting exoplanet. Astronomers will use the transit to test the techniques they have developed to analyse the composition, structure and dynamics of exoplanetary atmospheres. Secondly, they will be able to make simultaneous Earth- and space-based observations of Venus's atmosphere. These joint observations will give new insights into the complex middle layer of Venus's atmosphere, a key to understanding the climatology of our sister planet.

'This transit of Venus will be the last of our lifetime and will give a unique opportunity to closely observe an Earth-like planet passing in front of a Sun-like star,' said Dr Thomas Widemann of the Observatoire de Paris, who is co-organiser of the workshop.

Snip

http://phys.org/news/2012-03-transit-ve ... lanet.html

Sky please remind us about this so we can search the web for images and post them back here on thread.

Sure thing L. I will have to do some research as to the exact timing of the event based on location. Glad you asked, as I have forgotten about it already...

For those who can watch the Venus (once - in - a - lifetime) transit on June 5 or 6, check out your details here: - http://www.transitofvenus.org/

or here : - http://www.iceinspace.com.au/63-658-0-0-1-0.html


The map of the time zones is here: - http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/tran/TOV2012-Fig01.pdf

or



to big to fly it here...



which sadly shows we in my part of Africa are gonna miss out on the live siting - booo!

which means I am going to tune into a webcam view of it - which I am still to find.

Good luck for those in the Easter US and USE proper eye protection!

The Transit of Venus happended with a most notable anomaly:

The Transit path has changed, it means that something has moved Venus from its orbit...

TPTB noticed it and start moving the telescopes to simulate a normal path but this lead to a round transit as this graph shows the pathetic intent of TPTB to lie to the public:

What a cool find recall!

I took a snappy of the transit via webcam =>

It was waaayyy cool, Sky! Thanks for posting all the info.

Tried to make a view with a pin hole camera (two sheets of paper with a pin hole) - yeah, NOT! These old eyes couldn't see a thing!

Wound up watching it on NASA TV!

HUBBLE TRANSIT OF VENUS:

One of the big ironies of the 2012 Transit of Venus was that NASA's greatest telescope didn't dare photograph the event. Hubble's instruments are so sensitive, one look at the glaring sun would have crippled its instruments. Nevertheless, Hubble managed to join the show. Astrophotographer Theirry Legault caught the observatory flitting in front of the sun alongside Venus:






"I was in north-east Australia for the full transit of Venus and a transit of Hubble in the middle," says Legault. "My Nikon D4 digital camera was working at 10 fps on a Takahashi FSQ-106ED telescope to record 9 images of HST during its 0.9s transit."

This is certainly an historic photo. Imagine what James Cook would think of a telescope in space crossing his field of view as he watched the transit of 1769 from a beach in Tahiti. Moreover, imagine what kind of telescopes will be crossing the sun when the next Transit of Venus occurs in 2117. Congratulations to Legault for capturing a truly rare 0.9s slice of history.

More slices of history may be found in the Transit of Venus Photo Gallery:
http://spaceweather.com/gallery/

Second Anomaly on Transit of Venus

Venus is Wobbling all the Way in its orbit like a rollercoaster

Note:
Satellite is on a Lagrange Point, its means that the Satellite did not move at all or the image of the Sun will move too, but it didn´t.