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Venus Transit Finished
KjetilK writes "Venus is just about to cross the solar disc.
Direct from the control room in the Frogner Park in Oslo, I'm pleased to inform you that we have a great webcast, and as far as we know, it is the only webcast that still stands upright... Slashdotters, do your worst! ;-) A Venus transit is one of the most unique astronomical events in our time, in fact, no living person has witnessed it before today. And today, more people have seen it from the park where I'm sitting that in the rest of human history. Also, it had tremendous importance for the development of science, as it gave the first absolute measurements of distances in the solar system. Especially in 1769, a transit made science take huge leaps forward. And BTW, New Zealand and Australia were 'discovered' in the process" Some nice photos from the UK, photos from vt-2004.org, and if you missed it, it'll be eight short years till you can try again.
Snippet:
How transits can determine distances:
Hmmm.
Well, if you would read the Science section, you would see it did indeed get posted a while ago.
/. ...
Though, even if it didn't, there are websites other than
There once was a transit of Venus...
If you were lucky, you may have been able to see the ISS transit the sun at the same time. Details on Thomas Fly's site: http://iss-transit.sourceforge.net/IssVenusTransit .html
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
sounded pretty neat, they have a good write up here Since I missed it glad someone took some pictures!
*narf!*
Possibly because the best place to observe this wasn't in the US? The BBC and ITV having being flogging this for a few days so we all knew about it.
Boring Old Fart (40, married, 3 kids...er no...make that 49, married, 3 grown up kids...it's been a long time)
Leigons of small black dots protested the international frenzy over Venus' transit across the Sun by refusing to move across larger, white dots. "We're not getting fair and equal attention!" claimed Period.
Venus is just about to cross the solar disc
Of course, that was the case when submitted, but the editors thought it was best to wait until its over before putting it on the frontpage.
So the way it works is... when someone asks to slashdot a webcast, wait til its over to put it on the front page, but when an anonymous poster points to an IP (not a domain), slashdot the hell outta it.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Just wanna share with you folks some pics I took using nothing but the most basic equipment, including using a piece of Epson inkjet paper for projecting the image...
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
I can still see it everytime I close my eyes...
The event begins with rectum I...
I don't know, this sounds more like the transit of Uranus.
And as far as I know, no reports of ignorant and supestitious lunatics predicting the end of the world. This is progress. I hope...
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I wasnt aware this was happening until I work this morning and switched on the news.
;o)
It amuses me that any channel that covers these kind of events spends 2% of their times covering the basics of astronomy and why this event is quite rare.
The other 98% is spent explaining the danger of staring directly at the sun.
Then... I go to the park to eat my lunch in the sunshine (rare in the UK) only to see hoards of people doing exactly this (or thinking that cheap sunglasses will protect them). Worse is mothers trying to show their kids ("Mummy, mummy, I cant see anything... and my eyes hurt"... "Just keep looking sweety... you will see it when your eyes lose sensativity!").
So a further warning to slashdotters...
Dont stare directly at the sun...
Just get someone else to do it and descibe it to you
Why do all these pictures remind me of her ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Cool pictures, but some of them freak me out. That black sphere on the sun is just too reminiscent of Jupiter being consumed by the obelisks in 2010.
Strictly speaking, New Zealand and Australia were both 'discovered' (by both Europeans, and their indigenous inhabitants) well before 1769, when Cook sailed to Tahiti to observe the transit. Cook's contribution was mapping the coastline of New Zealand with much greater accuracy, and mapping big chunks of the eastern coast of Australia.
His biggest discovery was what he didn't find -- at the time, there was considerable belief in the idea of a "great southern land" somewhere in the Pacific, and Cooks three voyages, when taken together, cross-hatch the Pacfic and demonstrate that it contained no large and undiscovered landmassess.
`it'll be eight short years till you can try again.' now, this is truly significant event in astronomy.
Recording the transit of Venus was the official reason for Cooks voyage to Tahiti - he carried precise scientific instruments to record it, as recording it from different locations around the world would provide valuable information.
Once this was done, Cook opened a secret envelope which contained the real reason for his voyage - to discover the great unknown land mass in the south (Australia) and claim it for England.
Here are some photos from Winchester College, UK: Here and one that I took, Here, and Here (colour corrected)
A few years ago I bought a book that mapped all of the voyages that Cook had undertaken. It also showed copies of all the maps that he had with him when he went on his voyage of "discovery" when he visited Oz in 1770.
..
Cook knew there was a continent there from all of those maps and also from the accounts of all the other sailors that had been tooling around the area during the previous century. So he never really discovered it per se, more just claimed it for England. In fact as he was running around the Sydney area, the Frenchman La Perouse was also in the same area at the same time.
If anything the discovery of Oz by westerners should be credited to the Dutch, who ran into the west coast when they forgot to turn left on their trips around South Africa, and up to the East Indies. Google for Dirk Hartog and the silver plate he nailed to a tree well before Cook was a glimmer in his fathers eye. If the areas the Dutch had seen had a been a little bit more fertile, instead of bordering on major desert, then they might have wanted to spend a bit more time there. But when you are colonising sort of chap, a very dry west coast is not really all that appealing.
Of course if you want true discovery you have to go back to Aborigines who have been here for more than 40,000 years. And before you discount them as primative stone age relics, have a read of Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, and consider that their society was STABLE for 10s of THOUSANDS of years. Anyone want to take bets if western society can remain stable for another 100 years?????
Finally we have to thank you Yanks for the actual colonisation of Oz by the Brits. If you hadn't had that little war of independence back a few years ago, the Brits would not have had to find a new location for their crims. And I would have grown up speaking with a North American accent
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
There is a great picture of the event posted by a Canon 10D owner from Digital Photography Review website. He used an expensive filter and telescope.
Here are images taken with a regular interval, which can be retrieved with wget, and combined into a nifty time-lapse film, for example with Mencoder:
:)
mencoder -mf type=jpg mf://*jpg -o movie.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell:cbp:mv0
I'm usure about how copyright for the images works and if someone would be allowed to make such a film publicly available. That would lessen the burden on that server. Perhaps.
Though it is certainly true that astronomers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries spent a great deal of time and energy travelling to the far corners of the Earth to observe transits of Venus, these rare events were NOT their only chances to measure the absolute size of the solar system. Simultaneous or near-simultaneous measurements of Mars or certain asteroids also allow one to derive absolute distances via parallax; although the targets are more distant than Venus, they provide significantly better observing conditions and references for astrometry. Cassini, for example, used measurements of Mars in 1672 to calculate the Astronomical Unit (the distance between Earth and Sun) to better than 10 percent.
Still, transits of Venus were certainly a major focus for the astronomical community. I wrote up material on the geometry and history of transits for a seminar: read it for yourself . There are links to other good sites at the end of my lecture.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
Here is the best photo you'll see of this morning's transit. Taken by Jerry Zhu a member of the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh.
LINK
Look down the page to see the "ring of light" images which prove Venus has an atmosphere (as if we didn't already know).
-berek halfhand
Actually, where I was observing, for the first few minutes after sunrise, the sun was behind some very thick haze/thin clouds and you could see the transit happening with the naked eye and no filter!* We even had it in an 8" telescope without a solar filter for a few minutes!* It was amazing!!
*Kids, don't try this at home! And adults too for that matter... unless sanctioned by professional observational astronomers
Here's a few other pictures from a photography message board I frequent:
e .jpg
Nice color:
http://www.pbase.com/image/29906625
Impressive quality:
http://cakeru.image.pbase.com/image/29912804/larg
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If Mercury's orbit was not inclined with respect to the orbit of the Earth, Mercury would transit across the Sun every 116 days (the period of time between two identical configurations Sun-Mecuri as seen from the Earth; i.e. synodic period). But the inclination of Mercury's orbit (7 degress) causes that most times Mercury's path crosses "above" or "below" the solar disc, without a transit taking place. Therefore, on average, there are only 13 transits per century, separated by intervals ranging from 3.5 to 13 years. Currently, transits of Mercury can only occur during the months of May and November. Stolen From http://www.am.ub.es/~emasana/mercuri2003/faq_eng.h tml
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
With thanks to Google:
Transits of Mercury: 2001-2100
Date Time
2003 May 07 07:52
2006 Nov 08 21:41
2016 May 09 14:57
2019 Nov 11 15:20
2032 Nov 13 08:54
2039 Nov 07 08:46
2049 May 07 14:24
2052 Nov 09 02:30
2062 May 10 21:37
2065 Nov 11 20:07
2078 Nov 14 13:42
2085 Nov 07 13:36
2095 May 08 21:08
2098 Nov 10 07:18
-- IANAL, BIPOOTV
Just look at these pictures. They were taken by the Swedish Solar Telescope.
:)
Too bad I couldn't see the transit from my place. Maybe in 2012 I can be in the right location. Does any Hawaiian, Japanese or Polinesian slashdotter have a room for rent in June 2012?
What's the deal with using the term "solar disc" instead of the usual "sun"? I'm not sure if using the former is supposed to make the event sound more impressive or what?
Tonight there is an hour long program on BBC 2 at 11.20PM about the Transit of Venus.
More Information
It was a great event :)
Our norwegian, super-enthusiastic astrophysiologist, Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard, really made my day. Props to him for being who he is, a real geek without being afraid of showing it. And he thinks these things are so extremely fun, that I think so myself.
And the best of it all was that he asked his girlfriend to marry him, in the middle of the whole set. Mad, mad, mad man. But still so great, and so much fun.
Well, and to argue against those just saying "What the heck, it's just a black spot": Well, if I only had the chance of singing "Amazing Grace" once every century, I'd probably do it. Not because it's a good song, but because it's special. After all, it just happens once every seldom time. And the last time, it gave us many answers to astroscientific questions.
Phew, no getting up at 5:30 for astrological events the next few weeks.
In a documentary on the origins of the chronometer, they mentioned the use of observations of Jupiter's moons, along with a set of tables, as a method of determining time.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
My brother in the UK snapped a few pictures using a pair of binoculars and a bit of cardboard.
Worst BBC News Stories
http://www.jackstargazer.com/VTLinks.html
a zer/SG04 22.rm?usehostname
and
Real webcast of event:
http://www.miamisci.org:8080/ramgen/starg
I think you will find that the frequency of Really Interesting Events hasn't changed.
What has changed, however, is the amount of publicity they get. Thanks to facilities like this one, more people know about them. At one time only people who read specialist literature knew about various comets, oppositions, and so on.
...laura
I posted this when Slashdot ran the previous Venus transit story, but I'm afraid that not many people had the chance to read it, because I was pretty late into the discussion. Anyway, you don't get to read something like this every day, and the quote can be read in context now, this month, and never again.
"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.
Maybe it's just me, but it reminded me of someone very large using XEyes to find their mouse
.(
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
http://tech.pomfretschool.org/~jl/images/venustran sit.jpg
On June 6th, 2012, Slashdot will post a story about the transit of Venus, and some schmuck will complain that it's a dupe... and then link to this story.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
This website has ready-made movies for your downloading convenience.
No realli! She was Karving her initials øn the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law -an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink"..
Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti...
Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër ?
-1 anal retentive nitpicking?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)