Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2004 June 8 
Posted on 06/08/2004 3:26:01 PM PDT by petuniasevan
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2004 June 8
Explanation: Today an astronomical event will occur that no living person has ever seen: Venus will cross directly in front of the Sun. A Venus crossing, called a transit, last occurred in 1882 and was front-page news around the world. Today's transit will be visible in its entirety throughout Europe and most of Asia and Africa. The northeastern half of North America will see the Sun rise with the dark dot of Venus already superposed. Never look directly at the Sun, even when Venus is in front. Mercury's closer proximity to the Sun cause it to transit every few years. In fact, the above image mosaic of Mercury crossing the Sun is from two transits ago, in November 1999. Will anyone living see the next Venus transit? Surely yes since it occurs in 2012.
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Such wonderful shots.
Cool!
Thanks for posting this!
Guess this happened last night Alaska time.
It seemed to me that Venus crossed more of the sun than is shown in this picture. Is parallax that much of a factor?
I was up at 4 AM to catch the NJ sunrise (~5:30), but low clouds where I was kept me from seeing the sun until about a half hour after it rose and the seeing wasn't very good. I wasn't able to see the Venus disk until I drove to another location but by that time it was projection only.
I'd been looking forward to this ever since I saw my first transit of Mercury back in the 60s.
ML/NJ
Cool!
Thanks again!
As the article states, that is a pic of the MERCURY transit of 1999.
The beginning of the transit was just visible at sunset in Anchorage. No mention of visibility in Fairbanks was made.
I didn't even try to look at it. Don't want to have to get a seeing-eye-dog. No dogs allowed in my apartment.
Perelandara Bump!
ML/NJ
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