Venus is silhouetted as it crosses in front of the sun as it sets behind the Kansas City skyline Tuesday. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
As I walked up to the enormous telescope and peered into the viewfinder, our planet, out sun, our galaxy all came into focus.
Tuesday was the Transit of Venus, when the planet and its elliptical path were in line with Earth and the sun. It’s called the Transit of Venus because it transits across the sun, creating a silhouette of the planet.
So there is the sun, that is big and bright and looks like, well the sun, with sunspots and all that are clearly visible. With some of the telescopes, you can even see the solar flares erupting around the edges. Then there is this dot, perfectly round like a beauty mark on the face of the sun, slowly making its way across.
The event only happens in eight-year pairs and more than 100 years apart. The last event was in 2004, so the next won’t be until 2117.
I'd say more than 100 people came through the Tulsa Air and Space Museum to look through the telescopes set up by Astronomy Club of Tulsa members. I think I said "wow! That's so cool!" about 500 times as a hopped from telescope to telescope. It's something that I will never forget, which is good because I'll never experience it again.
If you missed it yesterday, unfortunately you won’t see the live event again in your lifetime. But lucky for you, a bunch of people took a lot of pictures and videos, some are better than what a telescope can provide. Here are a few.
You really should watch this in full screen HD.
This time lapse is from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which NASA says “is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun's atmosphere, magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate. SDO provides images with resolution 8 times better than high-definition television and returns more than a terabyte of data each day.
“The videos and images displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light. 304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.”
A bird sits atop one of the domes of the landmark Taj Mahal as Venus, top left, begins to pass in front of the sun, as visible from Agra, India, Wednesday, June 6, 2012. People around the world turned their attention to the daytime sky on Tuesday and early Wednesday in Asia to make sure they caught the rare sight of the transit of Venus. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer)
The planet Venus crosses in front of the face of the Sun, taken outside the Tulsa Air & Space Museum in Tulsa, Okla, on June 5, 2012. JAMES GIBBARD/Tulsa World (telescope equipment courtesy of Tony White and Michael Blaylock)
James Liley from Tulsa adjusts his telescope which he lined up to project in image of the sun onto a white screen with venus crossing in front of it so visitors could witness the rare event, taken outside the Tulsa Air & Space Museum in Tulsa, Okla, on June 5, 2012. JAMES GIBBARD/Tulsa World
Of course, for all the space you can handle, go to the
NASA website.
Also, check out
this collection from Christopher Smith, Tulsa World photo editor. Really fantastic stuff.
--Jerry Wofford
