The 2012 transit of Venus

The 2012 transit of Venus (金星凌日) occurred on 5 June when the planet Venus appeared as a small, dark disk moving across the face of the Sun. It began at 22:09 UTC, and finished at 04:49 UTC on 6 June. Depending on the position of the observer, the exact times varied by up to ±7 minutes. Here it is a photo Peter Ng gave me yesterday. To me, Venus in the photo looks like a dirty particle on the lens of a telescopic camera.

Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable celestial phenomena and occur in pairs eight years apart which are themselves separated by more than a century: the previous transit was in June 2004, and the next pair of transits will occur in December, 2117 and December, 2125 which means they are none of our business.

The entire transit was visible from the western Pacific Ocean, north-westernmost North America (Peter Ng and Felix Ching can see it), northeastern Asia, Japan, the Philippines, eastern Australia (Ho Keung’s family can observe it), New Zealand, and high Arctic locations including northernmost Scandinavia, and Greenland. In North America, the Caribbean, and northwestern South America, the beginning of the transit was visible on 5 June until sunset. From sunrise on 6 June, the end of the transit was visible from South Asia (people of Hong Kong can see it), the Middle East, east Africa, and most of Europe. The phenomenon was not visible from most of South America nor from western Africa.