Transit of Venus captures the imagination of a worldwide audience
This year's transit of Venus was an international social event, with millions in the UK also watching a BBC Horizon special
At 5:45am (BST) on Tuesday morning, the clouds above Blackheath in
London parted and the assembled group of amateur astronomers quickly
pointed their telescopes at the Sun. A well-ordered queue of around 100
people went in for a close look at the black disc of Venus
sliding across the face of our nearest star. The planet had been
transiting for the previous six hours and these were the last few
minutes. By 5:50am it was all over.
"This was a chance to see the mechanism of the heavens in action in a way that you really don't see very often," said Marek Kukula, public astronomer at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London, who helped organise a public viewing of the transit of Venus in Blackheath with the local Flamsteed Astronomical Society.
"And it was a chance to do something as a community. Even when we thought we weren't going to see it, when the clouds were resolutely there, there was a great sense of everybody out there making an effort together. Even if we hadn't seen it, we would have felt it was worth getting up at four in the morning. So, just to catch it literally minutes before it was over was a fantastic bonus."
Last night's transit of Venus was an international social event. Tens of thousands of words and scores of graphics on dozens of websites and in newspapers and magazines had prepared the ground for people around the world to take part in viewing this once-in-a-lifetime event.
Transits of Venus occur in pairs - the last one happened in 2004 and the next pair will not appear until 2117 and 2125. Around the world, the buildup to take part in something so rare was palpable: people tweeted their plans to watch the transit and organised themselves into local groups, they advised each other about the safest ways to take part and quizzed scientists about the things transits can tell us about exoplanets and other heavenly mysteries.
On Tuesday night around 2.4m people in the UK tuned into BBC2 to watch a Horizon special on the science of the transit - a respectable audience for a science programme up against the live launch of Big Brother on Channel 5 (which had 2.7m viewers). A further 1.7m people were watching ITV at the time and 1.4m people were watching Channel 4.
As soon as the transit began at 11pm (BST) on Tuesday night, webcams from Nasa (and a myriad other places) showed live progress and Twitter and Facebook buzzed with newly taken pictures of the event as it unfolded.
Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society, who managed to glimpse the transit from a windswept, cloud-covered hill in the Cotswolds, said that events such as the transit were powerful levers for creating interest in astronomy. "The vast majority of those people aren't going to go on to become research scientists, but one or two might have been adolescents who were wondering about science and perhaps this will spur them on."
Each of the transits in the past few centuries has similarly caught the public's imagination, said Kukula. "It's always been a bellwether of what the latest astronomical technology can do. In the 19th century, photography was just on the scene; in the 21st century, it's digital imaging and then the ease with which these can be distributed on the internet. We saw a little bit of that in 2004 but much more in 2012. The other thing is that we can take pictures of it not just from the Earth but from space as well and that's where some of the most spectacular images have come from."
Massey said the technology would continue to improve. Who knows, he added, perhaps amateur astronomers will routinely control telescopes in space by 2117 and professional scientific missions might see people flying ever closer to the Sun itself.
"I was up at 11pm last night to watch it start from the internet," said Kukula. "You can watch it live, you can watch it from the other side of the world, how cool is that? Captain Cook would have given his right arm to do that."
"This was a chance to see the mechanism of the heavens in action in a way that you really don't see very often," said Marek Kukula, public astronomer at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London, who helped organise a public viewing of the transit of Venus in Blackheath with the local Flamsteed Astronomical Society.
"And it was a chance to do something as a community. Even when we thought we weren't going to see it, when the clouds were resolutely there, there was a great sense of everybody out there making an effort together. Even if we hadn't seen it, we would have felt it was worth getting up at four in the morning. So, just to catch it literally minutes before it was over was a fantastic bonus."
Last night's transit of Venus was an international social event. Tens of thousands of words and scores of graphics on dozens of websites and in newspapers and magazines had prepared the ground for people around the world to take part in viewing this once-in-a-lifetime event.
Transits of Venus occur in pairs - the last one happened in 2004 and the next pair will not appear until 2117 and 2125. Around the world, the buildup to take part in something so rare was palpable: people tweeted their plans to watch the transit and organised themselves into local groups, they advised each other about the safest ways to take part and quizzed scientists about the things transits can tell us about exoplanets and other heavenly mysteries.
On Tuesday night around 2.4m people in the UK tuned into BBC2 to watch a Horizon special on the science of the transit - a respectable audience for a science programme up against the live launch of Big Brother on Channel 5 (which had 2.7m viewers). A further 1.7m people were watching ITV at the time and 1.4m people were watching Channel 4.
As soon as the transit began at 11pm (BST) on Tuesday night, webcams from Nasa (and a myriad other places) showed live progress and Twitter and Facebook buzzed with newly taken pictures of the event as it unfolded.
Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society, who managed to glimpse the transit from a windswept, cloud-covered hill in the Cotswolds, said that events such as the transit were powerful levers for creating interest in astronomy. "The vast majority of those people aren't going to go on to become research scientists, but one or two might have been adolescents who were wondering about science and perhaps this will spur them on."
Each of the transits in the past few centuries has similarly caught the public's imagination, said Kukula. "It's always been a bellwether of what the latest astronomical technology can do. In the 19th century, photography was just on the scene; in the 21st century, it's digital imaging and then the ease with which these can be distributed on the internet. We saw a little bit of that in 2004 but much more in 2012. The other thing is that we can take pictures of it not just from the Earth but from space as well and that's where some of the most spectacular images have come from."
Massey said the technology would continue to improve. Who knows, he added, perhaps amateur astronomers will routinely control telescopes in space by 2117 and professional scientific missions might see people flying ever closer to the Sun itself.
"I was up at 11pm last night to watch it start from the internet," said Kukula. "You can watch it live, you can watch it from the other side of the world, how cool is that? Captain Cook would have given his right arm to do that."
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