On June 5th, 2012, Venus will pass across the face of the sun, producing
a silhouette that no one alive today will likely see again.
Transits of Venus are very rare, coming in pairs separated by more than a
hundred years. This June's transit, the bookend of a 2004-2012 pair,
won't be repeated until the year 2117. Fortunately, the event is widely
visible. Observers on seven continents, even a sliver of Antarctica,
will be in position to see it.
The nearly 7-hour transit begins at 3:09 pm Pacific Daylight Time (22:09
UT) on June 5th. The timing favors observers in the mid-Pacific where
the sun is high overhead during the crossing. In the USA, the transit
will be at its best around sunset. That's good, too. Creative
photographers will have a field day imaging the swollen red sun
"punctured" by the circular disk of Venus.
Observing tip:
Do not stare at the sun. Venus covers too little
of the solar disk to block the blinding glare. Instead, use some type
of projection technique or a solar filter. A #14 welder's glass is a
good choice. Many astronomy clubs will have solar telescopes set up to
observe the event; contact your local club for details.
Transits of Venus first gained worldwide attention in the 18th century.
In those days, the size of the solar system was one of the biggest
mysteries of science. The relative spacing of planets was known, but
not their absolute distances. How many miles would you have to travel to
reach another world? The answer was as mysterious then as the nature
of dark energy is now.
Venus was the key, according to astronomer Edmund Halley. He realized
that by observing transits from widely-spaced locations on Earth it
should be possible to triangulate the distance to Venus using the
principles of parallax.
The idea galvanized scientists who set off on expeditions around the
world to view a pair of transits in the 1760s. The great explorer James
Cook himself was dispatched to observe one from Tahiti, a place as
alien to 18th-century Europeans as the Moon or Mars might seem to us
now. Some historians have called the international effort the "the
Apollo program of the 18th century."
In retrospect, the experiment falls into the category of things that
sound better than they actually are. Bad weather, primitive optics, and
the natural "fuzziness" of Venus’s atmosphere and other factors
prevented those early observers from gathering the data they needed.
Proper timing of a transit would have to wait for the invention of
photography in the century after Cook’s voyage. In the late 1800s,
astronomers armed with cameras finally measured the size of the Solar
System as Edmund Halley had suggested.
This year’s transit is the second of an 8-year pair. Anticipation was
high in June 2004 as Venus approached the sun. No one alive at the time
had seen a Transit of Venus with their own eyes, and the hand-drawn
sketches and grainy photos of previous centuries scarcely prepared them
for what was about to happen. Modern solar telescopes captured
unprecedented view of Venus’s atmosphere backlit by solar fire. They
saw Venus transiting the sun’s ghostly corona, and gliding past magnetic
filaments big enough to swallow the planet whole.
2012 should be even better as cameras and solar telescopes have
improved. Moreover, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is going to be
watching too. SDO will produce Hubble-quality images of this rare event.
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World visibility map for June 5-6, 2012 Venus Transit. Credit: M. Zeiler
http://www.nasa.gov
