Dan's Papers June 29, 2012 part 1 by Dan's Papers

DAN’S PAPERS

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June 29, 2012 Page 117

From Venus to Mercury and Back By robert sforza

heir eyes were watching Venus. It may sound like the premise of one of Ray Bradbury’s novels, but this doesn’t fit under the science fiction heading: this is science. Watching the sky last Tuesday night one could bear witness to one of the most spectacular astronomical sights to be seen in the sky with one’s own eyes. I watched from the North Fork as Venus passed in front of the sun for several hours, appearing as a silhouette, a small dark dot, slowly moving in front of the solar disk before disappearing into the vast Milky Way.

humanism. We are, by and large, impetuous creatures. We are only concerned with our immediate needs, and the questions we cannot answer we dismiss as irrelevant. The transit of Venus has only happened eight times since the telescope was invented, and the last time it occurred, it wasn’t even visible in the Western Hemisphere. Entire lifetimes can go by with no one being able to see a transit of Venus, so we’re living in a lucky time to see this rarest of planetary alignments. There is something phenomenal about this event that simultaneously humbles us as living organisms, and sheds light on our very existence. Looking at a black spot in front of this large burning orange star, a spot that looks

no larger in its transit than an ant to us, we have to remind ourselves that we are looking at a planet. This should alert us to how small we really are in the universe, and how we essentially have no control over our fate in the cosmos. The New York Times called the Venus-transit “a last chance opportunity.” The Wall Street Journal described it as “a last chance glimpse.” The Washington Post predicts that after this the transit of Venus the phenomenon will “sink into history’s pages,” until the brightest planet transits again. Incidentally, if one missed out on this transit or is just genuinely intrigued, the transit of Mercury will occur on May 9, 2016, though it is not as rare as the transit of Venus.

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te Southamp e Celebra ton’s m o C

2012 Transit of Venus

The transit of Venus is an exceedingly rare astronomical event. It is assured that none of us who witnessed it will be alive for its next occurence, which will not happen until 2117. Viewing Venus’s transit through my friend’s Coronado telescope, with its built in hydrogenalpha filter, revealed the sun’s surface granulation and prominences extending outward into space with what looked like a hole punch in the orange paper of the sun. For those not interested in stargazing or astrology, the hype surrounding this exceedingly rare event may seem overblown— all this waiting around just to see a tiny black dot dart in front of the sun for several short hours? Of course, everyone has the right to hold his or her own opinion, but consider this: Venus is the brightest planet in the solar system and on some crisp clear nights one can see this incandescent planet illuminating the sky with the naked eye. On this particular night, however, the brightest planet’s radiance is completely overpowered by the sun’s own brilliance. Now, the transit of Venus has scientific relevance, too. For centuries it tantalized astronomers as they hoped they could use this phenomenon to answer an enduring question— the distance between the Earth and Venus. According to NASA, in the 18th century, astronomer Edmund Halley—after whom Halley’s Comet is named—theorized that if the transit of Venus was observed from various locations on Earth, scientists could use the data collected to calculate the Earth’s distance to Venus. Though if the science aspect of the event does not interest you, think of it in terms of

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