7 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 26.4 ms ] thread
Full title:

Venus passes between the Earth and sun this weekend — but don’t try to look for it

Any one going to try to look for it?

When I was in high school, the physics teachers set up a telescope aimed at Venus as it crossed the Sun's radius. It wasn’t visible to the naked eye, but through the telescope, you could see Venus as a tiny black dot drifting across the field of view. It was fascinating to watch a planet move in a perfectly straight line along its orbit.
Venus is our closest neighbor, ~42 million km from Earth at its closest; Mars is ~56 million km.