Transit of Venus

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Indranil Ray

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Jun 5, 2012, 1:34:19 AM6/5/12
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            “Transit of Venus,”
the event is an eclipse of the sun by Venus.

Venus will appear as a black dot that tracks a line across the sun’s face for several hours.


The top image shows Venus on the eastern limb of the sun. The faint ring around the planet comes from the scattering of its atmosphere, which allows some sunlight to show around the edge of the otherwise dark planetary disk. The faint glow
on the disk is an effect of the TRACE (Transition Region And Coronal Explorer) telescope. The bottom left image is in the ultraviolet, and the bottom right image is in the extreme ultraviolet.

During the stages at the start and end of the transit, two special phenomena may be seen. While Venus is partly off the solar disk , light scattered by the planet’s dense atmosphere will produce a thin, luminous ring around the silhouette.
This effect, called the aureole, was already seen during the 1761 transit of Venus and has helped astronomers to investigate the composition of the atmosphere.

Before the 1761 transit, the event had been observed only in 1639. In the intervening years, Edmond Halley had proposed a way to determine the distance from the Earth to the sun using measurements of the transit of Venus from two distant places on Earth. A key factor in the calculations was the difference in the time it took Venus to cross the sun’s surface, as viewed at the two locations.
Halley died before the 1761 transit, but his exhortations to his scientific colleagues were heeded.

Capt. James Cook, who voyaged to Tahiti to view the transit. A 1771 estimate of the distance from the Earth to the sun employing multiple measurements from both transits came in not too badly, at 95 million miles. The estimates would be refined to very close to the known value of 93 million miles a century later, after the 1874 and 1882 transits, the latter of which was observed at Harvard by a group of astronomers led by Observatory Director Edward Pickering.




Image credit:NASA/LMSAL [most recent was in 2004]

Indranil Ray
Msc [IT], MCA, MA [Astrology] Jyotish Bharati [Gold Medalist] Jyotish Shastri.


--
Thanks,

Indranil Ray

Msc [IT],MCA, MA[Astrology] Jyotish Bharati[Gold Medalist] Jyoti Shastri

For professional service Contact indrani...@gmail.com
Cell no:(91)9038585477 / 9433031757 / 8583939162









--
Thanks,

Indranil Ray

Msc [IT],MCA, MA[Astrology] Jyotish Bharati[Gold Medalist] Jyoti Shastri

For professional service Contact indrani...@gmail.com
Cell no:(91)9038585477 / 9433031757 / 8583939162






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