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[PyroDesu]

Watched it in person. I was at an Astronomical Society Transit/Star party, there were 4 scopes set up with filters and another projecting onto the wall of the observatory. Got some video, too, as well as a whole lotta pictures.

Also, you could see it with bare eyes through a filter.

[penguinofhonor]

List of Life Regrets, #1:

Not using the pickup line "So do you want to transit my Venus?" during the transit of Venus.

[Silfurdreki]

I was at the Department of Astronomy at Lund University to see the transit. Saw it through three telescopes as well as on a projection and with bare eyes (with filter, of course).

One of our PhD students took some great photos using one of the telescopes. This, for example.

[GoombaGeek]

I set up an event at our school, but it was cloudy...

...and it cleared up immediately after the sun had set...

...and it was clear ten minutes before the transit...

My only hope is to live healthily until 2117.

[Silfurdreki]

Venus' orbital period is roughly 0.6 years, so you would think that Earth and Venus would line up with the sun more often.

The problem lies in that their orbits are not quite coplanar, they're inclined 3.4° relative to each other, so a conjunction (line-up) is only possible at two very small regions in the Earth's orbit. The wikipedia article on the subject is a lot better at explaining it than I am.

[PyroDesu]

huh, I'd have thought transits would be more common, given how easy it is to get 3 objects into a line provided one of them has enough mass to remain stationary compared to the other two.

or is it just that venus' speed is just above earth's, so we don't 'catch up' to it for about 100 years?

We're orbiting, Venus is orbiting, and so Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena. 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 periodicity is a reflection of the fact that the orbital periods of Earth and Venus are close to 8:13 and 243:395

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_transit

Ninja'd