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Transit of Venus
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YSU Astronomy professor Dr. Patrick Durrell shows a telescope that will be used for viewing the June 5 transit of Venus.
By Peter H. Milliken | milliken@vindy.com
June 5 will be the last chance of your lifetime to see Venus cross the face of the sun, and the Youngstown State University planetarium staff will help you avoid serious or permanent eye damage by safely viewing this event through a filtered telescope.
The planetarium staff will set up two telescopes and issue protective eyewear for free public viewing of the Transit of Venus at the Mill Creek MetroParks Farm in Canfield.
The transit will begin shortly after 6 p.m. and end about six hours and 40 minutes later, but the Mahoning Valley’s view of it will be cut off when the sun sets just before 9 p.m.
The YSU planetarium staff will be accompanied by members of the Mahoning Valley Astronomical Society, who will have their own filtered telescopes set up and project the image of the transit onto a screen.
“It’s going to be literally a once-in-a-lifetime event because the next one’s not going to be until 2117,” said Dr. Patrick Durrell, associate professor of physics and astronomy at YSU.
“You can actually see that planet [Venus] against the sun,” and how small it is in relation to the sun, said Sharon Shanks, YSU planetarium lecturer and executive editor of Planetarian, the quarterly journal of the International Planetarium Society.
During the transit, Venus will appear as a black dot crossing the face of the sun as Venus passes directly between the Earth and the sun. Venus and the Earth are about the same size, Shanks noted.
The transit offers “another little bit of information for the appreciation of the universe that we live in,” Durrell said.
However, he added that any view of the transit is contingent on the sun’s not being obscured by clouds here during the transit.
Durrell emphasized the importance of filtered telescopes and the proper protective eyewear, namely solar eclipse glasses.
“It’s no different than looking at the sun any other time. It’s still never safe to look at directly,” he warned.
“As long as you’re careful and use telescopes with the proper filters, it’ll be a nice, safe, wonderful event to see,” he added.
Another free, safe, local transit-viewing opportunity will be outside the Farrell, Pa., High School planetarium, said Ted Pedas, planetarium founder and director-emeritus. Filtered glasses will be issued to viewers there, and the transit will be projected from a telescope onto a viewing screen.
“The fascination is that we can understand a little more of the workings of our wider solar system and where the earth is in relationship to the rest of the planets,” Pedas said of the transit.
The next pair of transits of Venus won’t occur until Dec. 10 and 11, 2117, and Dec. 8, 2125.
The crossing on June 5, 2012, will be visible for its full duration from Alaska, Hawaii, the Pacific Ocean, Australia and eastern Asia. The end of the transit will be visible from Europe.
The transits occur in pairs, about eight years apart, with each pair separated by more than a century.
The end of the most recent transit was visible here just after sunrise June, 8, 2004.
Previous transits occurred in the years 1518, 1526, 1631, 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874 and 1882.
Observations of the 1769 transit were made from Tahiti during the first voyage of the English explorer and naval officer, Capt. James Cook.
In 1771, Jerome Lalande, a French astronomer, calculated, based on timings of the 1761 and 1769 transits, that the sun is between 95 million and 96.25 million miles from the earth.
Following the 1874 and 1882 transits of Venus, Simon Newcomb, an American astronomer, calculated the distance between the sun and the earth at 93.3 million to 93.7 million miles.
In conjunction with the 19th century transits, American bandmaster John Philip Sousa composed the “Transit of Venus March.”
“If you hear a great orchestral work or read a great piece of literature, it moves you, and the same is true when you see the solar system in action,” Pedas said.
Much more recently, radar measurements of the distances to planets and asteroids and radio telemetry from space probes have allowed for much more precise calculations of the distance between the earth and the sun, which averages about 93 million miles.
Venus orbits the sun every 225 Earth days at an average distance of 67 million miles from the sun.
To help local residents prepare to observe this year’s transit, free, public one-hour, full-dome programs on the subject will be presented at YSU’s Ward-Beecher Planetarium at 8 p.m., May 25 and 26 and June 1 and 2. “The show covers a lot of the history of transits,” Shanks said.
The 146-seat planetarium is in Ward-Beecher Science Hall on Lincoln Avenue behind Jones Hall.
For more information, call YSU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy at 330- 941-3616.