Venus Transit, Tuesday June 5th

[Jarochai Alabaster]

http://www.transitofvenus.org/

If you're interested, here's data regarding safe viewing, phone apps, and general facts about the event. The next transit of Venus won't be until 2117, so this is the one shot most of us will likely have in our lifetimes. Granted, it's just a dot passing across the solar disc, but for space nerds, this is neat shit. The bf and I are hosting a Transit party, and our local forecast calls for clear and sunny skies on the 5th (Hopefully it sticks - the past few weeks have been pretty constantly cloudy).

One thing that's really neat - the phone apps are part of a global experiment to measure the size of the solar system (I'm assuming by measuring parallax). While I doubt the experiment will refine our understanding of the size of the solar system, it's still a neat way for average individuals to contribute and see scientific confirmation. This almost makes me wish I had a smart phone, and I may make the bf download the app.

[Ddrak]

Looking forward to this. Wednesday morning here...

Dd

[Jarochai Alabaster]

Do you know how much of it you get to see? If I'm visualizing this correctly, you should only have a few hours after sunrise to see it in your part of the world. Is that correct?

[Ddrak]

For me (east coast), starts about 8am and goes to 2pm.

Dd

[Jarochai Alabaster]

Oh, nice! That's longer than we've got in Omaha. It starts just after 5pm (5:04 for contact, 5:22 for full ingress) tomorrow, and the sun sets at 8:54. Plus we have houses blocking our western horizon - the sun will likely fall behind their roofs around 8:30 or 8:40.

[Ddrak]

I'm still trying to figure a useful and quick way to look at it...

Dd

[Jarochai Alabaster]

Yeah, I can't imagine any other way besides a telescope with solar filter. I watched a video that said it should be visible with eclipse glasses, but I'm skeptical. I'm quite certain my eyes aren't good enough for that. And the pinhole-shadow box technique would undoubtedly fail, too, given how tiny the spot of light in the box would be.

Do you have local astronomy clubs or perhaps a nearby observatory that may be doing public viewings? Worst case you can always watch the event online (I'm sure someone will be streaming it).

[Jarochai Alabaster]

First sighting!

Very, very cool to see a planet set over the solar disc as a comparatively tiny dot. Awe-inspiring, to be honest.

[Ddrak]

Friend brought a solar filter to work, could see it easily with the naked eye. Definitely cool.

Dd

[Jarochai Alabaster]

Toward the end of the evening as we were taking the telescope back inside my dad just held up our solar filter to look at through the naked eye, and I was actually surprised that we could see it. Even with my semi-bad eyes it was pretty clearly visible.