Avid star-watchers have another treat coming soon after the solar eclipse that occurred on May 20. On June 5, Venus will cross the Sun’s face from Earth’s perspective. This “Venus Transit,” as it is appropriately named, will involve a silhouette of Venus appearing as a tiny,slow-moving black dot.
This celestial event is a special opportunity and it is recommended that people try to see it since it is viewable from all seven continents and will not reappear for another 105 years, until it is the year 2117. The last Venus transit occurred in 2004. The vast difference in years is explainable because the Venus transits occur in pairs that are eight years apart. However, these dual events only occur once in a century.
“Only six such events have occurred since the invention of the telescope,” said astrophysicist Sten Odenwald, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. This puts the rarity of the event into perspective.
“I think this is the last one I’ll see,” said Dean Pesnell, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to SPACE.com. Pesnell is a scientist for NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory(SDO) spacecraft, which will have an unparalleled view of the transit. However, Pesnell and other SDO scientists will observe the transit in Fairbanks, Alaska, and with the aid of 10 to 20 educational displays with them, use the event to teach the public about the sun and SDO.
If the weather permits, the entire seven hour transit will be widely visible. Although most of the globe will be able to see a part of the transit, travel may be necessary to see Venus entirely enter and exit the linings of the sun.
However, one must take caution to never look at the sun with the naked eye. Cameras, binoculars, and small telescopes do not provide proper protection and are not substitutes for eye safety equipment. Take precautionary actions to secure solar filters like eclipse glasses, welder’s glasses with a darkness of 14, or special telescope filters as such. Sunglasses, although they may seem suitable, are unsafe to use for stellar occasions such as this. An easy method to view the transit is to use a telescope or a side of binoculars to project a magnified image of the disk onto a piece of cardboard. The projected image will be safe to look at and photograph, as the light will not damage either the eyes or the inner mechanisms of the camera. The safety precautions listed above are presented as such in perkins-observatory.org, a site hosted by the Perkins Observatory based in Ohio.
“It’s a one in a lifetime chance, so it’s nice I get to see it so young,” said Crescenta Valley High School junior Jae Won Choi. “All I have to do is look up at the sky to see something that occurs only once every hundreds of years, so I might as well.”
whoop i really liked this one! your style has improved so much since the beginning of the session 🙂
i liked how there were lots of quotes, but remember that quotes should be OPINION based– your first two quotes were largely facts (esp 1st one) that could have been written just as sentences, not quotes.
the last one was awesomesauce, though– i think just one more like that could have improved the article dramatically.
overall you did a nice job on keeping it simple, and i liked how you made it focused more on how people can experience it (2nd to last paragraph) rather than just what scientists think about it. you could have broken up fact paragraphs with some quotes, simpler interesting things, etc, though.
anyway great! i always think these kinds of events are so coolio keke
I’d like to say that using a telescope and binoculars to project images onto pieces of paper is not necessarily the best idea. Although the image may be visible, the instrument may actually heat up and become unusable.
Your article is well written and is highly informative. I understand that you may have wanted to use the quotes from scientists to give perhaps a sense of authority to what you say. You could try paraphrasing those instead of direct quotes. I’m just curious, but did you interview Sean Odenwald?
There are certain grammar bits that come out slightly awkward to me, but overall, your article is both timely and well-written. Nice job!