So being a nature guy, I had to post on the incredible phenomenon that happened this week - the transit of Venus across the sun. Which basically means that Venus travelled between earth and the sun.
It happens twice every 110 years or so, and those two times are eight years apart. So the last time was in 2004, then this past Tuesday, and now not again until 2117.
If you didn't know it was happening you would not have noticed a difference...actually, even if you did know it was happening you wouldn't have noticed anything. You couldn't look up at the sun and see it, not even with sunglasses, because the sun is way too powerful and Venus is tiny compared to the sun.
But if you were able to go to an astronomy lab, or had a welder's mask or a properly filtered telescope, here's what you saw - a small, dark spot, travelling across the top portion of the sun.
NASA has created a video of it, showing it through several different types of filtration. There are two things I think are really cool about this video:
1) The immense size of the sun! The sun is 150 million kilometres away from the earth. The distance between Venus and Earth rotates significantly because of Venus' orbit path, but in the case of this transit Venus is obviously between the earth and the sun, meaning it's a whole lot closer to us than the sun is. And yet, Venus appears as a small circle against the backdrop of a huge, shining star. It's amazing!
2) All the different views of the sun provided through NASA's filtration give an amazing picture of the sun. All we normally see on a day to day basis is an orange ball, and we even that we can't really see all that well because it's so bright. But the images in the video below show incredible detail to the sun that we would never be able to see otherwise.
Enjoy God's creation!
It happens twice every 110 years or so, and those two times are eight years apart. So the last time was in 2004, then this past Tuesday, and now not again until 2117.
If you didn't know it was happening you would not have noticed a difference...actually, even if you did know it was happening you wouldn't have noticed anything. You couldn't look up at the sun and see it, not even with sunglasses, because the sun is way too powerful and Venus is tiny compared to the sun.
But if you were able to go to an astronomy lab, or had a welder's mask or a properly filtered telescope, here's what you saw - a small, dark spot, travelling across the top portion of the sun.
NASA has created a video of it, showing it through several different types of filtration. There are two things I think are really cool about this video:
1) The immense size of the sun! The sun is 150 million kilometres away from the earth. The distance between Venus and Earth rotates significantly because of Venus' orbit path, but in the case of this transit Venus is obviously between the earth and the sun, meaning it's a whole lot closer to us than the sun is. And yet, Venus appears as a small circle against the backdrop of a huge, shining star. It's amazing!
2) All the different views of the sun provided through NASA's filtration give an amazing picture of the sun. All we normally see on a day to day basis is an orange ball, and we even that we can't really see all that well because it's so bright. But the images in the video below show incredible detail to the sun that we would never be able to see otherwise.
Enjoy God's creation!
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