Transit of Venus

~On Tuesday evening (EST), the planet Venus made an extremely rare transit of the Sun.  This happens because the planets of the solar system do not orbit directly on the same plane; all of the orbits of the major planets are ever so slightly tilted from the perspective of each other, and given the immense distances of space and the diminutive size of the planets compared to the Sun, a transit is a rare event.  In fact, this only happens with Venus roughly twice every hundred years, and the last transit (in 2004) was on a day of cloudy weather here in Raleigh, so this was the only chance in my life to see it. 

And see it I did!  My mother (who teaches astronomy) brilliantly set up a viewing box on which the transit could be projected from a telescope.  The telescope, borrowed from a local amateur astronomer, also has a filter that enabled us to look safely at the Sun and observe the transit directly, but with the viewing box, everyone could see it at once.  Here are some of the pictures that I took of the event:

^ You’d think it would be easy to point the telescope at the Sun.  You’d be wrong: unlike the Moon (which, from our perspective, is only slightly smaller than the Sun), you can’t just look up to where the Sun is without special eye protection, which we lacked.  It was surprisingly difficult to align the telescope correctly on the target, but align it we eventually did.  With the solar filter removed, the bright sunlight projected out of the eyepiece and onto the cardboard box.

The small black circle at 10 o’clock is the planet Venus as it slowly made its way across the Sun.  We managed to catch the very beginning of the transit, when Venus was on the edge of the Sun, and followed it as it moved farther on.  The smaller black dots are sunspots.

^ Tuesday evening was a bit cloudy here, and we sometimes had to wait a few minutes for the Sun to emerge (which necessitated a scramble to re-align the telescope before more clouds obscured the Sun).  In the above picture, you can see clouds moving across the face of the Sun, but Venus is still visible at 10 o’clock.

^ We set up the telescope on a sidewalk at the entrance to the housing development, and we waved over people as they drove in and out.  We had quite a few people stop, and they were amazed at this twice-in-a-lifetime event.  This woman and her fiancé stopped by to see the transit.

^ The viewing box was a great idea!

If you missed the transit, I’m afraid that, barring a longevity vaccine, you’re out of luck: the next transit of Venus across the Sun won’t occur until December 10, 2117.