Celestial treat for sky-gazers with Venus transit tomorrow

Skygazers in the country are in for a rare astronomical treat as the planet Venus moves across the face of the sun appearing as a small dark disc tomorrow. The phenomena is known as the transit of Venus, and the planet appears as a black spot travelling from one limb of the solar disc to the other. This happens because the planet Venus comes between the Earth and the Sun and thus appears as a small black dot on the sun to sky-gazers on Earth. The celestial event can be seen in India after sunrise on Wednesday. The next transit of Venus will occur after a century in 2117. The last Venus transit took place back in 8 June 2004 and its likely that most of us won’t make it for the next one since that will take place after 105 years. The Venus transit will be visible in India for nearly 4 hours. [caption id=“attachment_332356” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The Venus transit. AFP”]  [/caption] Transits of Venus is one of the most rare astronomical phenomena. Venus Transits take place in a pattern that repeats every 243 years. The transit takes place in pairs, which are 8 years away from each other and separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years. So why the long gaps in the transits? That’s because of the difference in the orbit planes of the Earth and Venus. The celestial event, lasting for about five hours 40 minutes, will start around 3:40 a.m. at locations in and around Kolkata. Hence, the beginning of the celestial happening will not be visible until the sunrise. The occurrence will be visible from anywhere in India. The greatest transit, when the black dot of venus can be observed at the innermost point of the solar disc, will occur around 7:02 a.m., Duari said. The transit will end (called egress) around 10:20 a.m. The small disc of Venus will touch the Sun’s disc internally at 10:04 am, and by 10:21 am will be completely out of it. The transit can be viewed properly only after half an hour post sunrise, Duari added. The entire event (ie, the four contacts) of the transit, will be visible from eastern Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, north Asia, eastern China, Korea, Japan, islands in the western Pacific Ocean, Hawaii, Russia, Alaska and north-west Canada. Only the first part of the transit will be visible before the sunset from eastern Canada, the US, Central America, the Caribbean and northwest South America. The last part of the transit will be visible in western Asia, India, Europe, the Middle East and eastern Africa. Throughout the world, tremendous amount of interest has been generated for this event, as the next transit will occur in 2117. Historically, the discovery of the transit of Venus not only started a new era of scientific experimentation through international collaborations, but also gave us the first concrete concept of the structure of the solar system. With inputs from IANS