» Home > In the News

Transit of Venus

5 June 2012
Astronomy

The video of the transit is available at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/06/time-lapse-video-of-venus-transit-… and at http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/transit-of-venus-first-pics/#m…

This follows a spate of articles over the last couple of days leading up to the transit. For example, at http://phys.org/print258017360.html we had a bit of a history lesson with Captain Cook's 1768 voyage to Tahiti. One of the jobs assigned to the research vessel was to plot the transit of Venus. Nobody was particularly interested in the dark spot crossing the face of the Sun. The idea was to measure the size of the solar system by first calculating the distance to Venus using the principles of parallax. People were sent to a variety of locations around the world – and Tahiti was chosen too.

At http://phys.org/print258017251.html we had the Mysterious arc of Venus – which was also picked up by Anthony Watts at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/05/transit-of-venus-today-may-reveal-… while at http://phys.org/print257922084.html there is a short fact file about Venus

Skip to content