A transit of Venus (or Mercury) is a different story. Those are NOT referred to as eclipses as they do NOT measurably affect the amount of sunlight reaching Earth.
However, it IS true that there has not been a Venus transit since 1882.
Here is a quote from Fred Espenak at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center:
The transit or passage of a planet across the face of the Sun is a relatively rare occurrence. As seen from Earth, only transits of Mercury and Venus are possible. On average, there are 13 transits of Mercury each century. In contrast, transits of Venus occur in pairs with more than a century separating each pair.
No living person has seen a transit of Venus because the most recent one occurred in 1882. This situation is about to change since Venus will transit the Sun on Tuesday, 2004 June 08. The entire event will be widely visible from the Europe, Africa and Asia as shown in the map in Figure 1 ( Low Res or High Res). Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia will witness the beginning of the transit but the Sun will set before the event ends. Similarly, observers in western Africa, eastern North America, the Caribbean and most of South America will see the end of the event since the transit will already be in progress at sunrise from those locations.
The principal events occurring during a transit are conveniently characterized by contacts, analogous to the contacts of an annular solar eclipse. The transit begins with contact I, the instant the planet's disk is externally tangent with the Sun. Shortly after contact I, the planet can be seen as a small notch along the solar limb. The entire disk of the planet is first seen at contact II when the planet is internally tangent with the Sun. During the next several hours, the silhouetted planet slowly traverses the brilliant solar disk. At contact III, the planet reaches the opposite limb and once again is internally tangent with the Sun. Finally, the transit ends at contact IV when the planet's limb is externally tangent to the Sun. Contacts I and II define the phase called ingress while contacts III and IV are known as egress. Position angles for Venus at each contact are measured counterclockwise from the north point on the Sun's disk.
Table 1
Geocentric Phases of the 2004 Transit of Venus
Event Universal Position
Time Angle
Contact I 05:13:29 116°
Contact II 05:32:55 119°
Greatest 08:19:44 166°
Contact III 11:06:33 213°
Contact IV 11:25:59 216°
Actually, binoculars or a telescope are just fine, provided you do the following:
Take a sheet of white paper. Point the binoculars or telescope at the sun, so that the light from the eyepiece shines on the paper. Focus the instrument so that the spot looks sharp.
Or, of course, you could do the old pinhole viewer -- take a piece of aluminum foil and cover one end of a toilet paper or paper towel tube. Poke one or more holes in the foil. To view, point foil end at sun, and let light freom the pinhole focus on a piece of paper. You can make a fancier viewer using an old shoe box, and use a sheet of wax paper as a screen on the other end of the box.