Transit of Venus 2012
Description: The page tries to bring people into contact who are interested in systematically photographing and evaluating the transit of mercury.
project (5756) photographing (27) transit of mercury (1) astronomical unit (1) distance to the sun (1)
On November 11, 2019, between 12:40 UT and 18:09 UT, a tiny black dot will pass the solar disc: A transit of Mercury , a quite rare event, will happen. The first part of the transit will be visible from Europe and Africa, its end from North America. The complete will be observable from South America only. The daylight side of the Earth (from where the transit may be observed) when the transit ... animation with Δt=30 min ... starts (12:40 UT) ... ends (18:09 UT)
Transits of Venus and Mercury played an essential role in the history of astronomy, because they offered the possibility of exactly measuring the distance between the sun and the earth, the so called Astronomical Unit (au) . Nowadays, this aspect is no more scientifically relevant. Nevertheless, the observation and evaluation of transits are of outstanding importance for educational reasons because they offer the possibility of retracing a central astronomical experiment which during the 18th and 19th centu
For those reasons, we organized projects to obtain "own" measures of the distance to the sun by using the past transits of Venus ( 2004 and 2012 ) and Mercury ( 2016 ). The coming transit of Mercury will be the last until 2032. Therefore, we will take the "last" chance to repeat the measurement of the au using a planetary transit which will be observable in North and South America from its beginning to the end. For Europe, the conditions are worse: The sun will already set at about 15:30 UT and the probabil
Transit of Venus 2012