- News

On June 5th and 6th there is an event taking place that will not happen again for another 105 years – it’s a twice in a lifetime opportunity. Why twice?

The event is a transit of Venus, and the last one was in 2004 – these transits come in pairs, eight years apart. A transit means that the planet moves directly between us and the Sun, and we can view it as a small dark circle moving across the face of the Sun. The transit takes about 6 hours, but in the UK we will only be able to view the last part of the transit, just after sunrise. HM Nautical Almanac Office give some good information on the timing of the event as seen from the UK. The best way to view the event is to project an image of the Sun – never try to view the Sun directly with the naked eye! Since the transit is taking place so soon after sunrise, the Sun will only be 10 degrees above the horizon, so you will need to make sure you have an unobstructed view.

The Bradford Robotic Telescope Project, sponsored by ESERO-UK, has put together a site where you can submit your own times when you see Venus cross the limb of the Sun. If you are in the UK, you will only be able to enter Contact 3 and 4, at the end of the transit. By collating a number of timings of the transit from across the globe, it is possible to make an accurate measurement of the distance between the Earth and the Sun – the mathematics behind this is here.

The National STEM Centre eLibrary has a new NASA Space Math collection which has a resource on transits, called Transit Math, which has activities that take a mathematical approach to looking at transits, eclipses and occultations. Other new space resources also include an Earth observation resource from ESA, the popular ESA/ESO Astronomy Exercise Series and two secondary resources from the Spacelink Learning Foundation.

There is a wealth of information on the transit at www.transitofvenus.org/ and if you want to see a webcast of the view from Hawaii, then try www.exploratorium.edu/venus. If you have any very young kids, why not show it to them too? When it all comes around again, in 2117, they could one of few to say that they’ve seen it all before.