Venus transit delights international stargazers
Venus transit delights international stargazers
Agencies, London/Lembang, Indonesia
Venus made a rare transit across the face of the Sun on Tuesday,
giving stargazers from Australia to the Middle East and Africa a
celestial view that no living person had seen before.
To the fascination of people around the globe armed for the
occasion with telescopes, pinhole cameras and special dark
glasses, Venus appeared at 0520 GMT (12:20 p.m. in Jakarta): a
small black dot on the lower edge of the Sun starting its six-
hour transit.
"We are watching the first transit of Venus since 1882 --
until this morning no one alive has ever seen this event," said
Dr Robert Massey of Britain's Royal Observatory in Greenwich as
more than 100 people gathered in the courtyard of the London
landmark to witness the phenomenon.
Banks of photographers with telephoto lenses and television
crews captured the event. People queued patiently as parents
lifted small children to gaze into telescopes set up in the
courtyard of the observatory on a clear, warm morning.
Others used special glasses handed out by staff to see the
event.
"It is very mysterious," said Japanese tourist Hiroyuki
Narasawa, after peering up at the sky through a cardboard tube
and camera.
Scandinavian airline SAS offered dark glasses to about 3,500
travellers on Nordic flights to watch Venus from above the
clouds. It was partly cloudy over sections of northern Europe.
On the other side of the globe in Australia it was already
afternoon when 40 amateur astronomers gathered at the home of Jos
Roberts north of Sydney.
"I feel very privileged to be alive at the right time, to be
in the right place, to have no clouds or monsoons," said Roberts
who toasted the event with champagne with his colleagues.
In Indonesia, hundreds of people also watched the rare transit
of Venus on Tuesday in various towns and cities including at the
Bosscha Observatory in Lembang, West Java.
"The Venusian transit only occurred six times during the last
373 years. The last transit was in 1882 and the next passage will
occur in 2012 but will not be visible in many parts of the
world," Bosscha Observatory head Dhani Hardiwidjaja told The
Jakarta Post in Lembang on Tuesday.
In the Middle East, schoolchildren gathered on the hills
outside Beirut to watch the passage through dark glasses.
For the Americas, however, the complete transit was only
partially visible.
In the past, scientists calculated the distance of the Earth
from the Sun, the astronomical unit (AU), from measurements of
the duration of the transit of Venus made from widely separated
latitudes.
England's Captain James Cook traveled to Tahiti on a special
expedition to make observations during the 1769 transit.
This time, too, observers around the world will be timing the
transit and repeating the historic calculations.
"It's the different timings (from different locations) which
allow you to measure the distance (to Venus)," said John Mucklow
of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa who used an old
telescope mounted on a wooden tripod to watch the spectacle from
the roof of a hotel near Johannesburg.
But Dr Robert Walsh, of the University of Central Lancashire
in northern England, had arguably the best viewing position --
the bedroom of British astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks who was the
first person to observe a transit in 1639.
"To see what he saw from a specific point is very exciting
indeed," he said.