Slashdot Mirror
2004 Venus Transit In Pictures
oneiros27 writes "For those astronomy fans out there -- pictures are starting to come in from the 2004 Venus Transit (where Venus passes in front of the sun). Times of the transit will vary by city, but make sure you use safe techniques for viewing the sun if you want to look for yourself."
Anonymous Coward writes "Check out the transit of Venus webcast from Australia. It starts at 4.50 UTC on June 8." Update: 06/07 04:03 GMT by T : Linked webcast link updated to a URL projected to better handle the load, thanks to reader Tom Minchin.
Golden State (California) wouldn't be able to see it.
commence!
I'M BLIND!!!!
I tried to look at Venus, and I burned out my eyes! Damn you Slashdot, damn you Sun! (The Sun, not Sun the Java people!)
It would be interesting if someday human could live in Venus (w/ the little help from terraforming), and experience the transit directly from there.
NASA.gov is in for the Slashdotting of its life!
how are "pictures starting to come in"?
When an event such at this occurs once in a lifetime, for the scientific enthusiasts or hobbyist, this is more than just a round disc blocking another shiny round disc.
We will learn more about this planet and how the corona varies compared to an eclipse.
This is a big desert, you could really get hurt out here. Now go away.... remember that you saw nothing.
I suggest you read Slashdot
The Australians will only be able to view a partial transit. According to my New Scientist, Eurasia and Africa will be able to view the entire transit, Eastern North America, South America and Western Africa will find that Venus will already be in transit at Sunrise, and Australia, Japan, Alaska and Indonesia will find the transit interrupted by sunset. New Zealand, the Western US and southern Chile will be unable to view the transit.
Perfect timing, as I will be able to see it straight after school, not to mention two hours of pure interesting and enlightening entertainment for free.
Beats TV any day.
When I was in middle school my teachers told me it was safe to look at partial eclipses with a welders mask on, but I have heard otherwise. Does anyone know about this?
Click for offensive t-sh
It says that you can project an image of the sun with binoculars, Im hoping that a telescope will work as well, if not, watch the news for "Wild fire obliterates southern ontario, /.er in questioning"
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
At least we'd all get an article on Slashdot....
actually dear poster its a twice in a lifetime experience..
the next transit is due in 2012
(+1 wiseass..)
When you say once in a lifetime, you mean twice in a lifetime? Venus will transit the Sun again in 2012, approx 8 years from now.
From the article on safe viewing:
"More recently, solar observers have used floppy disks and compact disks (both CDs and CD-ROMs) as protective filters by covering the central openings and looking through the disk media."
My Dear Watson, I have discovered another use for AOL CDs! Grab the one from under that cup over there; we're going to watch Venus!
It seems there is a Canadian atmospheric research satellite that will also be making measurements of Venus. They are using a infrared Fourier transform spectrometer and cameras with the hope of improving models for extra-solar transits (think finding ET).
I'M BLIND!!!!
For one thing, it doesn't start for another day and an hour or so.
(I'll admit that I panicked and rushed outside and took quick looks at the sun, before I came back and read the article and realized we still have about 25 hours until it even starts.
For another thing, slashdot was kind enough to post a link to safety instructions in the headline.
So, what are solar filters? How much do they cost and where can I get one if I want to drive across the country in a mad dash to catch it at sunrise in South Dakota or whatever?
I've been wanting to check out that Wall Drugs that so many people have bumper stickers for for awhile anyway. Maybe they sell solar filters? But if I'm going to drive halfway across the country I want more then just a pinhole thingy.
Who's up for a road trip?
But if you forgot safety and go temporarily blind, at least you can turn your Chinatown apartment into one big computer and discover a way to predict the stock market.
Howdy Doodly Doo!
Anybody want some Toast?
Back when the Magellan mission was mapping the surface of Venus, I had a planetary geology friend who was involved in assigning names to features. I managed to persuade him to name a crater after my girlfriend Marianne, as a birthday present to her. At the time I thought this gift was pretty cool; unlike star names, which are meaningless, this was an official designation, and furthermore Venus was the Planet O' Love.
My mistake, however, was to forgetting that Venus is eternal, but love isn't. Every time I see Venus hanging in the evening sky, I realize I named that damn crater after the wrong woman. LOL!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Their servers are keepin it up good. They were prepared for the huge amount of attention from the mars landings so they have some amazing infrastructure.
Thank god they didn't link to one of the 150,000kb RAW TIFFs. Nightmare for your connection and theirs =)
Ok, let's get a list of public viewings together.
Here's a list of web casts.
Anyone else have information on live viewings?
Thanks.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
According to the post "- pictures are starting to come in". According to my calculations the transit doesn't start for 26 hours from now.
I'm going to die in 2011, you insensitive clod!
it would have to be around a half million miles in diameter.
Nonsense. Have you seen the sun lately? It's about the size of a quarter, max.
The BBC and Open University have a nice section on this. Its worth looking at.
You can calculate the distance of the earth from the sun.
If you're in the UK, the BBC have some programs covering this on Tuesday. There's live coverage at 9.50AM on BBC1 and another program on at 12PM on BBC1. Theres a full hour program on BBC2 at 11.20PM. All presented by Adam Hart-Davis.
The photographic record of a Venus transit is nothing surprising. What astonishes me is that photographs are coming in from an event that is going to happen 2 days in the future.
Here is the map of the transit for 2004.
And here is the map of the transit for 2012.
So while I won't get to see it this year unless I hop in my car and drive east for about 20 hours without rest, I will get to see it in 2012, unless I'm in Chille or Argentina, or something.
The further north you are, the better your chances of seeing it.
If you're in Antarctica you won't see it at all.
Howdy Doodly Doo!
Anybody want some Toast?
The term eclipse is reserved for those events where the front object is large enough to significantly cover the back one.
During the transit Venus will only cover about 1/900th of the solar disk and as such this is not usually referred to as an eclipse.
What matters are the apparent sizes of the two bodies not their actual sizes, for example, the Moon is nowhere near half a million miles in diameter but when it transits the face of the Sun the event is called an eclipse. This is because, from the surface of the Earth, the apparent sizes of the Moon and the Sun are very similar and the moon is capable of blocking out a large fraction of the solar disk, sometimes even cover it completely.
Imagine you travelled to Venus during the transit - the disk of the planet would get larger and larger until around 1 million kms (630 thousand miles) from the planet it would be large enough to totally eclipse the Sun.
He would have posted the comment sooner but he had a cold.
Hey, I heard the Monkeys got arrested ... it appears they got drunk and tried to peel Bananarama.
*shudder* '80's humor, I'm embarassed that I actually wrote this down. Mod me way down, if you value our civilization.
No, you see Venus would have to be bigger to cause an eclipse. At least the size of the moon, maybe a little bigger.
But since it's only the size of a Transit Van, it's passage across the face of the sun will only be The Transit of Venus.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
If you RTFA (I know, I'm new here) it says that venus will appear as 1/33 the width of the sun.
Watson: "My dear Holmes, I've been using AOL CDs to watch Uranus for years!"
Fellowship 9/11
West coast gets hosed again!
We never get to see end-of-the-world omens here on the left coast!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
...I'm tempted to make a Soviet Russia joke about them Slashdotting us...
What, like how in Soviet Russia, Nasa slashdots you?
Hope be with ye,
Cyan
There are a number of places in Sydney holding events for the transit. It seems that Sydney Observatory is booked out, though you can go along in the evening to watch various webcasts of the transit as it goes on in sunnier places.
The event I'm involved with is the Macquarie University Observatory event, which is taking place on the vacant lot at the intersection of Culloden and Talavera Roads, North Ryde (out behind the uni, not at the observatory).
For a gold coin donation you'll be able to look through a telescope at Venus, see the video display from one of our ccd cameras, observe the sun through a variety of projection methods and also with eclipse shades. So, it's good value, and all proceeds go to building a new observatory and planetarium (as opposed to the Feed the Starvind Astronomers Foundation, which I think is a more noble cause).
We'll be there from 3pm, see here for more information.
I was listening to Day to Day/Science Friday in the car the other day and I believe they said the next one is in 8 years.
The US Naval Observatory has 11 photographic plates from the last transit of venus in 1882. As well, there are photographs from the various expeditions it sent out to take measurements for the purpose of calculating the AU, the distance of earth from the sun. These can be found here. There's also more fun to be had.
Web page for University of Maryland, College Park, venus transit
"Witness the first Transit of Venus in 122 years
Join the Department of Astronomy
Tuesday, June 8
from 5:30 - 7:30 AM
5th Floor Balcony, Plant Sciences Building
Park (free) on Level 3 in the Regent's Drive Parking Garage (entrance on Stadium Dr.).
Walk across the bridge (near section 3-4) in the southwestern corner of the garage.
Enter the building and take the elevator (you will be on the 2nd floor) to the 5th floor.
Walk out onto the balcony.
In case of cloudy weather, join us in the Computer and Space Science Building (on Stadium Drive), in the Computer Lab, Room 1220. We will view the transit using the computers."
I have discovered another use for AOL CDs!
Sorry to spoil your day, I just tried it and it's yet another thing that AOL disks are useless for
I just tried a glimpse with various CDs. I find that a single unlacquered CD thickness leaves too much brightness, but 2 CD thicknesses (silver/recorded sides towards the sun) might be ok. (Care now!! Don't blame me if it's too bright for you!)
But another thing is, the CDs probably need to be unlacquered on the non-recorded side (or at least have a partly unlacquered patch to see through). The colored lacquers cause light-scatter and fuzziness of the object seen. (The latest AOL disk had a thick red layer on the non-recorded side, and this made a very fuzzy sight, which I think will be useless for finding a small dot only about 1/32 the diameter of the sun.)
-wb-
It's not an eclipse because the sun isn't blocked out completely. Whereas transit is perfectly sensible, since venus appears to move across the sun...
Just thought this might be an interesting thing to share with you:
"There will be no other [transit of Venus] till the twenty-first century of our era has dawned upon the earth, and the June flowers are blooming in 2004. What will be the state of science when the next transit season arrives God only knows." - William Harkness, USNO, 1882
Don't follow Bob's example...
Ydco co
One time I was writing a web bot and it went berserk and started downloading images from NASA as fast as it could... 10,000 in half an hour. I emailed an apology to the web master. He emailed back and said they hadn't even noticed, that that my hits constituted an insignificant fraction of their daily traffic.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
I just tried a glimpse with various CDs. I find that a single unlacquered CD thickness leaves too much brightness, but 2 CD thicknesses (silver/recorded sides towards the sun) might be ok. (Care now!! Don't blame me if it's too bright for you!)
Congratulations, it's possible you've just done a great deal of damage to your eye. While CD's are (mostly) opaque to visible wavelengths, they're totally transparent to the infra-red. CD's, floppy disks and other media are not safe solar filters.
Do not use make shift filters for direct solar viewing, unless you know the transmission coefficients of the material.
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
A dot on the sun? Big deal? YES! The transit of Venus was a very important event in the history of astronomy and science. Previous transits were used by clever astronomers to calculate one of the most important measurements in all of science: the Earth-Sun distance, or 1 AU. By observing the transit of Venus from two distant locations on Earth and comparing the measurements you can determine the parallax angle. With those angles and one side of the triangle measured, simple geometry gives you the Earth-Sun distance. Once you have that number you can do all kinds of fun things; like figure out the distances to the rest of the planets, or by using the Earth orbit diameter to calculate stellar parallax and the distances to nearby stars, and on and on from there. The Venus transit is a *very* significant event.
The Transit of Venus is a phenomena witnessed very seldomly -- in fact, next Tuesday's transit will be the first witnessable from Earth since 1882. (Google News points to hundreds of stories.) The transit of a planet occurs when it passes between another and the sun, thus only transits of Mercury and Venus are possible from Earth. It will begin at 05:13 Universal Time, which is 9:13pm July 7 on the US West Coast (more info), and it will last several hours. NASA has a map that shows when and where it will be viewable (more maps here), some safety tips for properly viewing the sun, and a Sun-Earth Day 2004 web site with lots more, including where to find webcasts. This Transit of Venus FAQ should answer many of your questions, including why transits of Venus follow a regular pattern of recurrence at intervals of 8, 121.5, 8, and 105.5 years. FYI, The event won't be visible in North American sky until the sun rises, and by then it will be almost over. If you miss this one, you'll have one more chance at it on June 6, 2012, when the transit will be most visible the Pacific.
(I submitted this to Slashdot several days ago; I was rejected.)
If you want more info, your library should have the May 2004 issue of Scientific American, which has an excellent article about previous transits. It's amazing to see how a single event provides a reference point for the passage of time and progress of society. Imagine what it will be like when the first of the pair of Venus transits comes in 2117. Maybe we'll be watching it from Mars as well...
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Uh, can you provide a source for this? I'm more inclined to believe NASA than a random post on /., no offense...
According to this, CDs and Floppy disks both make safe filters. Optically crummy filters, yeah. But safe. Maybe because the document is specifically taylored to eclipses where the amount of sunlight is less?
Space.com has an article on it. The next time is in 2012. "The next transit is on June 6, 2012 and will be visible from northwestern North America, northern Asia, Japan, Korea, eastern China, Philippines, eastern Australia, and New Zealand, according to NASA. Portions of the 2012 event will be visible in parts of North America, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa."
from http://www.wa.gov.au/perthobs/Venus/venus.html
Transits of Venus across the disk of the Sun are among the rarest of planetary alignments. During the interval from 2000 BCE to CE 4000, a total of 81 transits of Venus occur, that is, one every 74 years on average. However, they almost always occur in pairs (separated by 8 years) and so even a long-lived person may not get to witness a Venus transit in their lifetime. The next transit of Venus will occur in 2012. More than a century will elapse before the next pair of transits in 2117 and 2125, and the two previous transits occurred 1874 and 1882.
It is only during early December and early June that transits of Venus are possible. This is the time when Venus's orbital nodes pass across the Sun. If Venus reaches inferior conjunction (Sun, Venus and Earth aligned) at this time, a transit will occur. Transits show a pattern of recurrence at intervals of 8, 121.5, 8 and 105.5 years. The planet Mercury can also transit the Sun, and it orbits the Sun more quickly than does Venus, so it undergoes transits much more frequently. There are about 13 or 14 transits of Mercury each century. However, the size of Venus is larger (about 3% the Sun's diameter) and is more easily observable, and its proximity to Earth makes the highly desirable effect of parallax more pronounced.
Edmund Halley first realised that transits of Venus could be used to measure the Sun's distance, thereby establishing the absolute scale of the Solar System from Kepler's third law. This is also the first step in determining the size of the Universe. Halley realised that the careful timing of transits could be used to determine the distance of Earth from the Sun. The technique relied on observations made from widely separated sites across the Earth. The effect of parallax on the remote observers would allow them to derive the absolute distance scale of the Solar System. Venus transits were better suited to this goal than were those of Mercury because Venus is closer to Earth and consequently exhibits a larger parallax. Unfortunately, his method proved impractical since contact timings of the desired accuracy are impossible due to the effects of atmospheric seeing and diffraction. Nevertheless, the 1761 and 1769 expeditions to observe the transits of Venus gave astronomers their first sound value for the Sun's distance.
Transits of Venus have a special connection for Australians because it was after observing the 1769 transit in Tahiti that Captain Cook arrived on the East Coast of Australia and claimed it for Britain, thus setting in train its colonisation by Europeans.
In the 18th century, the Pacific Ocean was still virtually uncharted and there were rumours of a large southern continent called Terra Australis Nondum Cognita (the southern land not yet known). French, Dutch and English sailors, had hunted in vain for this mythical land. The British Admiralty wanted to organise a scientific expedition to observe the transit of Venus due in June 1769 and the expedition was also given the secret mission of finding the southern continent.
After observing the transit in Tahiti, Cook sailed on to the North Island of New Zealand and then the South Island. He found that neither island was joined to a large southern continent. He continued towards Tasmania and then northward, arriving at Botany Bay in April 1770.
Radar measurements currently provide very accurate distances to the Sun and planets, so transits are now of less scientific importance. However, these rare and remarkable events remind us of a technique important to the development of modern astronomy.
Taken around 5:40 AM GMT, Sunrise - http://www.actane.com/perso/jvincent