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The Venus Transit 2004
Walkiry writes "In just 47 days our friendly neighbour planet Venus will be passing right in between Earth and good ol' Sun, giving us the chance to see a small black spot going accross the disk (last one was in 1882). This is called the Venus Transit. The interesting thing is that there is a project asking for volunteers to perform their own measurements of the phenomena and submit their own results, in what will be the first accurate and public measurement of an extraterrestrial distance. Do you have a spare telescope and some free time on June 8th?"
Of course we do. What did you think we would be doing, going on dates with women?
Okay, everybody stare directly at the Sun.
Ahhh, My EYES! The goggles do nothing! (Damn you /.)!
...accurate and public measurement of an extraterrestrial distance.
Maybe it's just me, but somehow those two words don't seem to quite go together.
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
What equipment and observing method are you going to use? Will you project an image of the Sun on a screen? Will you use a camera? Is it already available or will you have to build (buy) it?
I plan on buying a 12" Celestron and doing my observations *with my naked eye*, like a MAN! What kind of wuss would use a screen or a camera? Astronomers seem to have lost the direct feel of things these days, with all them modern equipments...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Apaprently, the next Venus transit after this one will be in 2012, but the next two after that won't be until 2117 and 2125. Looks like a once in a lifetime deal. (source: http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/transit/venu s0412.html)
Homer: It's like you're from Venus... ...and you're from Mars.
Marge:
Homer: Oh, sure, give me the one with all the monsters.
Nyo nyo, the Neko Boy has spoken.
It was in a situation like that that Venus athmosphere (its clounds) was discovered, when Venus was against the sun an astromer saw a fog over the planet. A lot of light passed trough where previously was thoug to be solid.
This is what i found in Wikipedia on Venus Transits:
"Transits of Venus, when the planet crosses directly between the Earth and the Sun' visible disc, are important astronomical events. The first such transit was observed on December 4, 1639 by Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree. A transit in 1761 observed by Mikhail Lomonosov provided the first evidence that Venus had an atmosphere, and the 19th century observations of parallax during its transits allowed the distance between the Earth and Sun to be accurately calculated for the first time. The previous set of transits of Venus occurred within the interval of 1874 - 1882, and the next set of transits will occur in the period of 2004 - 2012."
"Anyone who quotes me in their
can't see it from north america!
Most astronomical events seem to not be visible from or get clouded out in my area.
no big sig
What's proabaly better is a projection scope. A prpoer one is very expensive, but you can just hold any convex lense or piece of shirt cardboard with a really tiny hole in it above a piece of white paper. You'll need very good resolution to see this though, so you should probably calculate that ahead of time.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
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Create a WAP server
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I have no developed opinion on the bararity of foo. -homeobocks, Gentoo Forums
How long should I stare at it ?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
According to that website, this will be visible in parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. It is pretty light on detail, but according to this site parts of it will be visible from Australia and the eastern parts of North and South America.
Benmore Peak Observatory (http://www.observatory.org.nz) in New Zealand's South Island will be hosting a bunch of visitors for this one. Not only is the view of Venus going to be good, so is the view of the lakes and snow-clad mountain peaks around it. I was there in 2000 and it's just absolutely outstanding (and they always have lots of icy cold beer)! Thoroughly recommended.
Despite warnings every year people get blinded because they wanted to see a partial eclipse or some other solar event directly.
Use a telescope or binoculars and project the image onto a piece of white cardboard or paper.
Even just a few seconds can ruin your eyesight so be careful. It's no joke.
Why is it this reminds me of "Day of the Triffids?"
There's a little black spot on the sun today...
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
From 1882? I don't think so.
Think again. We do have photos of it. A movie has even been made.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
The other kind of sun filter fits over your eyepiece or inside your eyepiece. I once had a 2.4 inch refracting telescope that came with this piece of welder's glass that fit over the eyepiece. I never used it because I was warned not to.
The advantage of the objective sun filter (the ones I have seen advertised are aluminized mylar) is that 1) it blocks out intense sunlight before it even gets to your telescope, and 2) it is exposed to no more than normal sun intensity because it hasn't been concentrated by the telescope.
The wee bit of welder's glass at the telescope eyepiece is unsafe because it is getting the full focus of sunlight from the telescope and the thing and crack from the heat and then your eyeball is in peril.
The other safe method is projection through the telescope on to a piece of paper. Safe for one's eyes -- I ruined my beginner's refractor doing that because the heat cooked a cheap plastic element in the one eyepiece it came with.
Find the biggest paper cup or popcorn bucket possible, tape thin paper over the top and poke a hole in the base. Point at sun, view image on paper. It's easy enough to teach the kids in the neighborhood when the parents wonder what the strange guy with the paper cup is doing.
If the image isn't large enough, simply pull the paper off and project in the usual way. The paper cup is easy enough for kids to hold. For some reason, flat sheets turn into crumpled useless things when exposed to kids.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
"There's a little black spot in the sun today..."
Goals for 2011: 1. Stop plate tectonics. 2. Prevent animal predation. 3. End supernovae now. 4. Rid the world of evil.
the last time an eclipse was viewable in my area, i used a couple of polarizers to look at it and it worked pretty well
you adjust the light that gets through easily by just turning them with respect to each other.
might even work in front of a telescope
I made a quick video using Celestia of the Venus transit. It requires Divx and it's about 330KB in size and runs for 18 seconds.
:)
Here is the link. Ugh, be gentle.
This also just gave me an idea. Being in North America, I might use Celestia to watch this happen in real time on June 8!
"In just 47 days our friendly neighbour planet Venus"
Why "friendly?" Because they don't try to invade us as often as Mars does?
Truly it was a most exquisite and memorable sight. The sun was already beginning to put on the ruddy hues of sunset, and there, far in on its face, was the sharp, round, black disc of Venus. It was then easy to sympathise with the supreme joy of Horrocks when, in 1639, he for the first time witnessed this spectacle. The intrinsic beauty of the phenomenon, its rarity, the fulfilment of the prediction, the noble problem which the transit of Venus enables us to solve, are all present to our thoughts when we look at this pleasing picture, the like of which will not occur again until the flowers are blooming in the June of A.D. 2004.
Robert Stawell Ball, The Story of the Heavens (1885)
Not only do I get to see amazing astronomical events, while I am there I travel around and see wonderful and interesting parts of our own planet!
To pay for my vacations to these selected events, I have established travel investment funds (setup many years in advance) for:
I also keep an emergency fund that allows me go anywhere in the world at a moments notice to see a Supernova bright enough seen with the naked eye. I had such a fund in place which allowed me to rush from California to Australia some 21 hours after the discovery of 1987A (24 Feb 1987).
Maybe next naked eye supernova viewable in my hemisphere. But if not, I have another supernova fund ready ...
I first learned about the Transit of Venus, in the early summer of 1970, during a Morrison Planetarium program of the California Academy of Science. At the age of 9 I decided that I wanted to see next transit.
I have waiting patiently for 34 years to make my transit observations. It is now only a few dozen days away!!!
chongo (was here)
...accurate and public measurement of an extraterrestrial distance.
... determine these orbits far more accurately (by one or two orders of magnitude) than do the optical data." The report for the current latest general ephemeris on public release DE405, here, says much the same.
I doubt that the public project related to the 2004 transit is intended to obtain more accurate measurements than already exist, for the distances and timings associated with Venus.
For all of the inner planets, even the best professional optical telescope measurements are already so much less accurate than modern non-optical measurements, such as radar-ranging and spacecraft measurements, that optical data (except for the outer planets) did not contribute at all to the final data-sets that went to make up the current best professional ephemerides. This JPL report, about the latest-but-one of the professional solar-system ephemerides, DE403, says that "all of the optical observations for the Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars were omitted from the least-squares adjustments leading to DE403. Newer and more accurate data-types
The project for measuring the timing of the June Venus transit looks like mainly an exercise in public awareness and education. Maybe there is also an aim of historical reconstruction, for doing something like re-assessing the performance of the old astronomers who measured previous transits, in an age when optical telescopes still did provide the only serious measurements available.
-wb-
The GONG is used to watch the Sun oscillate, or "ring," which provides mighty useful data on the solar interior. Helioseismology, in other words. See http://gong.nso.edu for details.
Credit Line: The GONG is operated by the National Solar Observatory which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation, for the benefit of the astronomical community.