Friday, June 08, 2012

Venus Crossing the Face of the Sun...


...is called a Transit of Venus. From Earth,  only Mercury and Venus may be seen crossing the face of the Sun. If one were able to stand on Jupiter, one could see Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, making transits ('trips'; 'voyages', 'crossings'), across the Sun, at certain points in time.
Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable celestial phenomena and occur in pairs, eight years apart, which are themselves separated by more than a century...
The last Transit of Venus was June 8, 2004. The previous two Transits were in 1874 and 1882...!