Transit of Venus, 2012

Image of transit taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft. Venus is in the upper right quadrant
Main article: Transit of Venus

The 2012 transit of Venus, when the planet Venus appeared as a small, dark spot passing across the face of the Sun, began at 22:09 UTC on 5 June 2012, and finished at 04:49 UTC on 6 June.[1] Depending on the position of the observer, the exact times varied by up to ±7 minutes. Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable celestial phenomena and occur in pairs. Consecutive transits per pair are spaced 8 years apart, and consecutive pairs occur more than a century apart:[2] The previous transit of Venus took place on 8 June 2004 (preceded by transits on 9 December 1874 and 6 December 1882); the next pair of transits will occur on 10–11 December 2117 and in December 2125.[3]

Observations of the event

Path across the Sun, with contact times and other data
Visibility map

The entire transit was visible from the western Pacific Ocean, northwesternmost North America, northeastern Asia, Japan, the Philippines, eastern Australia, New Zealand, and high Arctic locations including northernmost Scandinavia, and Greenland.[4] In North America, the Caribbean, and northwestern South America, the beginning of the transit was visible on 5 June until sunset. From sunrise on 6 June, the end of the transit was visible from South Asia, the Middle East, east Africa, and most of Europe. The phenomenon was not visible from most of South America, nor from western Africa. There were a number of live online video streams with footage from telescopes around the world. Midway through the transit one of the NASA streams had nearly 2 million total views and was getting roughly 90,000 viewers at any given moment.

In Los Angeles, crowds jammed Mount Hollywood where the Griffith Observatory set up telescopes for the public to view the transit. In Hawaii, hundreds of tourists watched the event on Waikiki Beach where the University of Hawaii set up eight telescopes and two large screens showing webcasts of the transit.[5] The transit was also observed and photographed by a flight engineer aboard the International Space Station, Don Pettit.[6]

NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory could not see the transit as it was not in between the Earth and the Sun at the time of the event, but high-definition images of the event were obtained by Solar Dynamics Observatory, from 36,000 km (22,000 mi) above the Earth. Agency astrophysicist Dr. Lika Guhathakurta said, "We get to see Venus in exquisite detail because of SDO's spatial resolution, SDO is a very special observatory. It takes images that are about 10 times better than a high-definition TV and those images are acquired at a temporal cadence of one every 10 seconds. This is something we've never had before".[7]

Research

Children in Dili observing the transit of Venus

The 2012 transit gave scientists a number of research opportunities. These included:[8][9][10]

North America:

Europe:

Asia:

Australasia:

Others:

References

  1. ↑ Espenak, Fred. "2012 Transit of Venus". NASA. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  2. ↑ Withrow, Jay (2 June 2012). "Venus-sun event rarer than Halley's Comet". Omaha World-Herald. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  3. ↑ Klotz, Irene (6 June 2012). "Venus transit offers opportunity to study planet's atmosphere (+video)". Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  4. ↑ Grego, Peter; Wulf, Andrea; Cooper, Keith (June 2012). "The Transit of Venus". Astronomy Now. Pole Star Publications: 58–61. ISSN 0951-9726.
  5. ↑ "Last transit of Venus this century draws stargazers around the world". The Guardian. 6 June 2012. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  6. ↑ "Stargazers watch rare Venus transit". Al Jazeera. 6 June 2012. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  7. ↑ Amos, Jonathan (6 June 2012). "Venus makes rare trek across Sun". BBC News. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  8. ↑ Wall, Mike (16 May 2012). "Venus Transit On June 5 May Bring New Alien Planet Discoveries". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  9. ↑ "Counting down to the Transit of Venus – our nearest exoplanet test-lab". Phys.Org. 5 March 2012. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  10. ↑ "The Venus Twilight Experiment: Refraction and scattering phenomena during the transit of Venus on June 5–6, 2012". venustex.oca.eu. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
  11. 1 2 Koukarine, Alexandre; Nesterenko, Igor; Petrunin, Yuri; Shiltsev, Vladimir (November 2013). "Experimental Reconstruction of Lomonosov's Discovery of Venus's Atmosphere with Antique Refractors During the 2012 Transit of Venus". Solar System Research. Springer. 47 (6): 487–490. arXiv:1208.5286v1Freely accessible. Bibcode:2013SoSyR..47..487K. doi:10.1134/S0038094613060038.

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to 2012 Transit of Venus.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 9/27/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.