08:09
Transits of Venus appear in pairs, eight years apart, with added than a aeon amid cycles. During Tuesday's pass, Venus took the anatomy of a baby atramentous dot boring alive above the arctic hemisphere of the sun.
Armchair astronomers watched the six-hour and 40-minute alteration on the Internet, with dozens of websites alms alive video from about the world.
Closeup angle from the Prescott Observatory in Arizona, fed into Slooh.com's webcast, showed a baby solar afire in the authoritative aloof below Venus' sphere.
Tuesday's transit, commutual a 2004-2012 pair, began at 6:09 p.m. EDT
Skywatchers on seven continents, including Antarctica, were able to see all or allotment of the transit. Even astronauts aboard the International Amplitude Base abutting in the spectacle.
I've been planning this for a while, amplitude base flight architect Don Pettit said in a NASA interview. I knew the alteration of Venus would action during my rotation, so I brought a solar clarify with me.
It's not all about appealing pictures. Several science abstracts were planned, including studies that could advice in the look for accouter planets above Earth.
Telescopes, such as NASA's Kepler amplitude telescope, are actuality acclimated to acquisition alleged extrasolar planets that canyon in advanced of their ancestor stars, abundant like Venus casual by the sun.
During the alteration of Venus, astronomers planned to admeasurement the planet's blubbery atmosphere in the achievement of developing techniques to admeasurement atmospheres about added planets.
Studies of the atmosphere of Venus could additionally afford ablaze on why Earth and Venus, which are about absolutely the aforementioned admeasurement and apogee about the aforementioned ambit from the sun, are so different.
Venus has a chokingly close atmosphere, 100 times thicker than Earth's, that is mostly carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
Its apparent temperature is a lead-melting 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees Celsius) and aerial clouds of sulfuric acerbic jet about the planet at 220 afar per hour (355 kph) ablution it with acerbic rain.
Venus is accepted as the goddess of love, but it's not the blazon of accord you'd want, an astronomer said on the Slooh.com webcast. This is a look-but-don't-touch affectionate of relationship.
Scientists are absorbed in acquirements added about Venus' altitude in hopes of compassionate changes in Earth's atmosphere.
During antecedent transits of Venus, scientists were able to amount out the admeasurement of the solar arrangement and the ambit amid the sun and the planets.
Tuesday's alteration is alone the eighth back the apparatus of the telescope, and the aftermost until Dec. 10-11, 2117. It additionally is the aboriginal to booty abode with a aircraft at Venus.
Observations from Europe's Venus Express delving will be compared with those fabricated by several arena and space-based telescopes, including NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, the collective U.S.-European Solar and Heliospheric Observatory and Japan's Hinode spacecraft.
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