Transit of Venus facts for kids

The 2004 transit of Venus

A transit of Venus across the Sun happens when the planet Venus goes between the Sun and Earth. It is a partial occultation of the Sun. When a transit happens, Venus can be seen as a small black dot going across the Sun. Transits of Venus usually take several hours.

Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable events which happen in astronomy. 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 most recent transit of Venus happened on 5 and 6 June 2012. It was the last Venus transit this century. The one before took place on 8 June 2004. The next transits of Venus will be in December 2117 and December 2125.

The transit on 5 and 6 June 2012 was broadcast live on the Internet.

During the 18th century, astronomers tried to use transits of Venus to measure the astronomical unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Many countries sent expeditions to distant lands to observe the transits from places as far apart as possible for maximum parallax.

One of the most famous expeditions was the voyage of Lieutenant James Cook in the HMS Endeavour.

Images for kids

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  Image of the 2012 transit taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft

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  Diagram of transits of Venus and the angle between the orbital planes of Venus and Earth

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  "Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa", a cuneiform clay tablet of astrological forecasts from the Neo-Assyrian period

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  Jeremiah Horrocks makes the first observation of the transit of Venus in 1639, as imagined by the artist W. R. Lavender in 1903

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  Diagram from Edmund Halley's 1716 paper to the Royal Society showing how the Venus transit could be used to calculate the distance between the Earth and the Sun

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  Account of George III's observations of the 1769 transit.

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  Diagrams from Mikhail Lomonosov's "The Appearance of Venus on the Sun, Observed at the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences On 26 May 1761"

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  Diagram from David Rittenhouse's observations of the 1769 transit of Venus

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  The "black drop effect" as recorded during the 1769 transit

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  The 1882 transit of Venus

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  Transit of Venus from Degania A, Israel, 2004

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