Posted 08 June 2012
Transit of Venus: View from Ireland obscured by clouds
The view from Ireland of the transit of Venus across the face of the sun, one of the rarest predictable solar system events, was unfortunately obscured by clouds.
But striking images of the transit were captured from other places around the world.
The transit of Venus takes place in a regular pattern of 8, 121.5, 8, and 105.5 years. So it will not be seen again until the year 2117.
Ultra-high Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit: Over a six-hour period on June 5-6 2012, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) collected images in many wavelengths of one of the rarest predictable solar events: the transit of Venus across the face of the sun.
“There was a chance that we could have seen the last 50 minutes or so of the nearly 7 hour transit of Venus from Ireland between sunrise and 05:54am on 06 June 2012, but unfortunately clouds obscured our view,” says Professor Lorraine Hanlon, UCD School of Physics, University College Dublin.
“Venus, the sixth largest planet in our solar system, and the second planet from the Sun, appears as a slow moving small black dot against the massive solar disc during the transit.”
The transit of Venus 2012 as seen from Cairns Australia recorded by the
Gloria Project
In the 18th century, scientists and explorers travelled around the world to watch the transit of Venus so they could calculate the size of our solar system.
Venus is sometimes referred to as the Earth's sister planet because it has a similar mass (80%) to the Earth, and similar diameter (95%) to the Earth. The diameter of Venus is about 7,521 miles (12,104 km), compared to the Earth’s diameter of 7,926 miles (12,756 km).
Gloria Project
Professor Lorraine Hanlon, UCD School of Physics, leads Ireland’s involvement in GLORIA, a citizen-science project led by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid involving 13 partners in 8 countries.
In the run up to the transit of Venus, GLORIA invited people all over the world to take images of what was happening in the world on the days of the transit and upload them to a public website.
For more information visit the Gloria Project.
(Produced by UCD University Relations)
