How The Transit Of Venus Still Helps Astronomers Today

Sunday, June 3, 2012 - 11:01 in Astronomy & Space

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012 at 3:03 PM PDT (California), Venus will do something for only the eighth since the invention of the telescope - it will cross in front of the sun. This transit is among the rarest of planetary alignments and it has an interesting cycle. Two Venus transits always occur within eight years of each other and then there is a break of either 105 or 121 years before it happens again.The moments when Venus first appears to cross the sun and the moments it leaves, known as ingress and egress respectively, have always been the most scientifically important aspects of the transit since comparison of Venus's journey viewed from different points on Earth gave astronomers one of the earliest ways to determine the distance between Earth and the sun.  read more

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