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ShareA transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth, 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 2004 lasted six hours).
A transit is similar to a solar eclipse by the Moon.
While the diameter of Venus is almost four 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.
Observations of transits of Venus helped scientists use the principle of parallax to calculate the distance between the Sun and Earth. Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena.
They occur in a pattern that 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. A transit of Venus took place on 8 June 2004 and the next will be on 5 and 6 June 2012.
The previous pair of transits were in December 1874 and December 1882.
After 2012, the next transits of Venus will be in December 2117 and December 2125. A transit of Venus can be safely observed by taking the same precautions used when observing the partial phases of a solar eclipse.
Staring at the brilliant disk of the Sun (the photosphere) with the unprotected eye can quickly cause serious and often permanent eye damage.
For more information about the topic Transit of Venus, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:
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