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On June 5 and 6, 2012 the planet Venus will pass in front of the Sun for the last time this century. Millions around the world will witness this rare astronomical phenomenon.
This website is entirely devoted to the transit of Venus: its history, where and when you should watch it and what you can do to get involved in the observation. Learn more...
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Monthly Archives: November 2011
As Andrea Wulf wrote in her November 14 post, captain James Cook wasn’t well received by the viceroy Antonio Rolim de Moura of Rio de Janeiro when his ship the Endeavour made a stop at that city in November 1768. … Continue reading
In November 1760 two French astronomers set out from Paris to view the transit of Venus from far-flung destinations: thirty-eight-year-old Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche began his 4,000-mile journey to Tobolsk in Siberia and forty-eight-year-old Alexandre-Gui Pingré to Rodrigues, a small island … Continue reading
On the remote and inhabitated Campbell Island French astronomer Jean Jacques Anatole Bouquet de la Grye installed several observatory huts to observe the 1874 transit of Venus. On the day of the transit it was cloudy and only five minutes … Continue reading
After weeks of persistent clouds and fog, I finally got my first short glimpse of a brilliant Venus just after sunset. Together with a crescent moon, the evening star staged a show low above the western horizon against a nearly … Continue reading
The challenge of observing the transit of Venus is timing the exact moment of the apparent contact between Venus and the Sun. One of the most appalling resuls of the 1761 and 1769 transits of Venus was the large difference … Continue reading
As part of the Eureka and Bio-Fiction events hosted by Comma Press in association with the Institute of Physics, novelist and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce read his interesting story about Jeremiah Horrocks, The Transit of Venus, at the Bluecoat, Liverpool, … Continue reading
We don’t tend to think of farmers when we think of natural philosophers and the practice of astronomy in the 18th century. Perhaps we should – Virgil’s Georgics were still read. The laurel for the much-anticipated 1758 recovery of Halley’s … Continue reading
In 1882 a couple of expeditions to observe the transit of Venus were also part of the expeditions sent out as part of the first International Polar Year. Or rather, it was the other way around. The German expedition stationed … Continue reading
In the nineteenth century it were newspapers which brought the on-going chain of events of the transit expeditions before a wide audience. Their coverage of the perilous operations of astronomers would generate an immense public interest in the transit of … Continue reading
If one is not vigilant when attending international conferences one can easily become infected by good ideas readily applicable to one’s local situation. Ari Gross, a graduate student at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology … Continue reading
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