Book Description

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 36. Chapters: 1769 Transit of Venus observed from Tahiti, 1874 Transit of Venus Expedition to Campbell Island, 1874 Transit of Venus Expedition to Hawaii, Anders Johan Lexell, Chasing Venus: the Race to Measure the Heavens, Christian Mayer (astronomer), David Rittenhouse, Guillaume Le Gentil, Jeremiah Dixon, Jeremiah Horrocks, Mikhail Lomonosov, The Transit of Venus (Doctor Who audio), Transit of Venus, 1639, Transit of Venus, 1874, Transit of Venus, 2004, Transit of Venus, 2012, Transit of Venus (opera), Transit of Venus (play), Transit of Venus March. Excerpt: A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth (or another planet), becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. During a transit, Venus can be seen from Earth as a small black disk moving across the face of the Sun. The duration of such transits is usually measured in hours (the transit of 2012 lasted 6 hours and 40 minutes). A transit is similar to a solar eclipse by the Moon. While the diameter of Venus is more than 3 times that of the Moon, Venus appears smaller, and travels more slowly across the face of the Sun, because it is much farther away from Earth. Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena. They occur in a pattern that generally repeats every 243 years, with pairs of transits eight years apart separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years. The periodicity is a reflection of the fact that the orbital periods of Earth and Venus are close to 8:13 and 243:395 commensurabilities. The last transit of Venus was on 5 and 6 June 2012, and was the last Venus transit of the 21st century; the prior transit took place on 8 June 2004. The previous pair of transits were in December 1874 and December 1882. The next transits of Venus...