The Upcoming Transit of Venus

"Venus in the west was as bright as a street lamp, as bright as life, as bright as Miss Huntress' eyes, as bright as a bottle of Scotch"*

.....For months, now, Venus has been bright in the western sky.  As I write this, I am looking out of our living room window at Venus, shining brightly in the west.  (For the next couple of days, Venus will be near the star El Nath, in Taurus, the tip of the southern horn of the bull and very close to the Crab Nebula.)  Venus is now getting less and less prominent in the evening, getting closer and closer to the western horizon as Venus races to pass us on our orbit.  Most times, that would be that for seeing Venus, until Venus appears in the morning sky in late June.  This time, as Venus passes by us, it will be visible as a shadow across the Sun.

.....It would seem like this should happen more often; if you ask a small child to draw the solar system (I would do this all the time, so I assume that all kids do this), the final result of nearly circles in a flat page would be very close to how the solar system is - but not quite.  The flat sheet of paper is close, as the planets orbit in very close to the same plane.  the orbit of Venus, for example, is at an angle of 3.39 degrees to the plane of the Earth's orbit.  Now, if I said that I would fling a baseball not at the center of your face, but at an angle of 3.39 degrees above the center, you would probably not be very happy.**  However, at the distance of Venus at its closest, Venus makes a dot of only 0.008 degrees across against the sky, so the chance of this dot overlapping the half-degree dot of the Sun is very infrequent.  The last time, before 2004, was 1882.  The next time will be in December of 2117.

.....In the late afternoon of June 5th (next month!) we will get to see this.  The continental US will see Venus still transiting the Sun as it sets.  Japan would be an excellent place to view the transit from, with Wake Island being perhaps the best of all.  (Geez, this would have been a good time to go back to Guam.)  As this month progresses, I will have a number of posts on how to watch this, but I wanted to start now.

 .....Still, while I was trying to find a public domain image of Venus to use, I came across this image, where sunlight can be seen shining through Venus' atmosphere.  Cool.

.....My next post will be about how to view the transit safely.  One could buy special film glasses to view the eclipse, but be absolutely sure that the film is not just "dark", but is specifically made to protect against ultraviolet light.  My next post will talk about why this is a danger, but just for the love of anything you like actually looking at, never stare directly at the Sun unless you abso-fraggin'-lutely know what you're doing.

* Raymond Chandler ***, Trouble Is My Business

** Don't worry; this is just an example.  There is a fairly limited number of people that I would like to smash in face the face with baseball, so I use this for a purely illustrative purposes.  Still, if you're not sure, ask.

**duh