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  • Below, Joseph Stebbins, left, and his two children Anna and Joey, went to INFINITY Tuesday to see Venus passing across the surface of the sun. The event is only visible from Earth twice every 120 years. The shot at right was taken with a digital camera and a special filter of Venus passing in front of the sun at about 7 p.m. Tuesday. Jeremy Pittari

    TRANSIT OF VENUS
June 7, 2012

Venus passes visibly across sun

By Jeremy Pittari, Item Staff Writer The Picayune Item

PICAYUNE — A handful of people gathered at Infinity Tuesday evening to witness an event that will not occur again until 2117, the visible transit of Venus across the sun.

While Venus orbits the sun, its orbit is typically not visible from the plane in which the Earth orbits the sun. However, every 100 years or so the orbits line up just right, allowing viewers from Earth to see the celestial event twice in an eight year period. The last visible transit was in June of 2004.

Carla Johns with Jet Propulsion Labs in California was at INFINITY on Tuesday armed with a special telescope that allowed viewers to see the rare event with their own eyes. Tom Nicolaides, a Pearl River County native who works for Stennis and who is a hobbyist astronomer, said the special telescopes filter out all light except for light from ionized hydrogen particles.

Since the telescope was invented in the early 1600s the event has been viewed only seven times, Johns said. The next occurrence will be more than one hundred years from now.

“We’ll all be long dead,” Johns said. “It’s very special to be able to witness something like this.”

Van Reiner with the Maryland Science Center said previous Venus transits helped scientists determine how far the Earth is from the sun.

Venus is the only planet in our solar system with a size similar to Earth’s, but viewed through the telescope or with special filters on a camera, it looked much smaller as it crossed the sun. That is due to the distance from Venus to Earth, about 32 million miles, making the planet appear as a small dot on the surface of the sun, Johns said. Venus took about seven hours to make the transit, but viewers in south Mississippi were able to see the event only from about 5 p.m. until sunset.

Cloud cover also proved to be a problem, but the clouds broke long enough for viewers to get plenty of glimpses of the rare event.

Viewers came from all over the country to see the event at INFINITY. Nora Normandy, who is a NASA employee and came from Washington D.C., said she enjoyed seeing the transit through the telescopes NASA had available.

Reiner came to INFINITY because Maryland was forecast to have a cloudy day.

“I figured if I didn’t see it now, I’d never see it,” Reiner said. Reiner is familiar with how planets move across their respective solar systems, since his job is to find planets orbiting around alien stars. That feat is achieved in a number of ways, including looking for gravitational wobble in the sun, light differences as a planet passes in front of the star and by using special telescopes. The ultimate goal is to find another planet that is capable of, or currently is, supporting life, he said.

“If we ever find something it will increase the knowledge of human kind,” Reiner said.

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