Venus goes past the sun

So yesterday was the transit of Venus, in which teeny-tiny Venus crossed between the earth and the sun just like it does in a sequence that occurs every 243 years. Two hundred and forty three years is nothing to a planet. It's little more than a sneeze contained in your whole lifetime. Why didn't I watch this the first time it happened in my lifetime, in 2004? Because I knew it would happen again 8 years later, and I was so confident that I would be around to see it? No, I think I just wasn't paying attention, as usual. Or maybe it wasn't visible here in Oregon; I don't remember at all.



 Today NASA came out with this super cool video of Venus-transit-shots. Scary in places. The sun!! It's a ginormous terrifying place of hell-fire, and little Venus just goes past, la la la, like there's nothing unusual at all. Or maybe Venus is like me, when I try to run up the driveway barefoot in August: ow ow ow ow ow ow whew glad I don't hafta do that for another 243 years. Venus is a closer neighbor of the sun though, so maybe it's more like hey Sun, how ya doin, hey look at that, the Earth is here too, whazzup?

 John learned (from one of his grad students) an easy way to watch the transit. Aim a pair of binoculars from the sun to a sheet of paper in a box (ok, we used a wastebasket).


Can you see little Venus? This made me so happy. Not as good as NASA's shots. But on the other hand it looks like Bart Simpson's eyeballs and that's worth something.

 Oh man I played with this link for a long time this afternoon. It begins with a hummingbird's egg and goes sooooooooooo far in either direction. The scale of our universe is crazy.

 Thanks to Hilary at The Smitten Image for giving this post a nice nod.