Venus Transit Available from South Africa

Tuesday, June 08 2004 @ 10:59 pm EDT

Contributed by: bobmoody

Our friends from Bloemfontein Centre of the Astronomical Society of South Africa (ASSA), in cooperation with Boyden Observatory near Bloemfontein, Free State, South Africa, have offered us a web link to a sister club's site in Pretoria, SA as Venus passes in front of the Sun on June 8.

My correspondence with the ASSA member Gerrit Penning continues with our discussion on what their club and other organizations in SA might be doing for the transit. Gerrit sent us the following link so that anyone who's interested might be able to check on the progress of Venus as it crosses the Sun's disk the evening of June 7th and 8th.

The link address is: http://www.etacarina.co.za/astrocam.htm.

This link is provided by Mauritz Geyser of the Solar Section of ASSA Pretoria Centre, in Pretoria, South Africa. This transit will take about 6.2 hours to happen with the end of it coming at around 6am local CDT. That would place the beginning of the transit starting at just before midnight CDT on the evening of Monday, June 7th.

UPDATE: 10:20 PM...

I would like to thank Josh Boose of KFSM-TV5 for all his excitement and help in getting the word out about this super rare event. Of ALL things astronomical which happen in regular cycles, this event is the rarest of them all. While the level of excitement may not be exceptionally high, the rarity of the event makes it very special. The last time this happened was in 1882, and only 6 transits of Venus across the face of the Sun have happened since the invention of the telescope in 1608.

The Americas will have our turn at the next transit of Venus on June 6, 2012. The next time Venus will be seen traveling across the Sun after 2012 will not be until 2117 !

Josh informed me this afternoon that the weather forecasts for South Africa did NOT look very promising. Showers and rain were likely, but because the event takes just over 6 hours to happen, there may be several scattered moments when the Sun may peek through the clouds for a limited view of the transit. Let's all keep our fingers crossed for some good views. ALSO, the national news should have video of the transit from various sites around Africa and Europe on tomorrow's newscasts.

SUPER COOL !

I've taken some pics of my monitor while the transit is in progress. I'm using a Canon Powershot A10 on automatic, without flash, and zoomed in on my monitor to 4.8x. The first image was taken at 00:45.

The next image reveals some of the passing clouds that the Pretoria Centre station is having to deal with to bring us this LIVE webcast. Clouds are moving across the image of the Sun every few minutes. I will be posting another story by Wednesday with many more images of the tiny black spot of Venus crossing the face of the Sun. REMEMBER, that Venus and the Earth are nearly equal in size. If it were Earth at this distance and Venus were in our position, there would be virtually NO DIFFERENCE in the size of the spot.

This third image is from another site, I believe from somewhere in Germany. (I've since discovered it was Vienna, Austria)The image of the Sun looks very different because a different type of filter is used. The first two images are taken with a telescope utilizing what is known as a "white light" solar filter. The third image is how the Sun looks through an H-alpha filter. The H-a filter "sees" the hydrogen in the Sun and gives a much redder image. The surface is also MUCH more detailed, with magnetic field lines and areas of surface activity showing easily in areas where the "white light" filters reveal little if any detail. The broken "line" of whitish features from left to right demarcate the Sun's equator. The last image was taken at 01:57am.

This will be the last image for this story at this time. It's now past 02:35 and I can't seem to find the right buttons on this keyboard. Since I don't want to lose any of what it's taken me so long to create, I ask everyone interested in this event to see my follow-up story with many more images on Wednesday.

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