As a child growing up I think Venus was my favorite planet. I remember how disappointed I was to learn that the average temperature on the surface of Venus was more than 400°C and it has an atmosphere of sulfuric acid. That pretty much guarantee's that no man will ever go the planets surface. Bummer.
Unless you live under a rock you must have heard that today Venus transited the Sun. As I'm sure you know I love this kind of thing so this afternoon at 3:10 PDT I took our welding goggles and went outside my lab to check out the sun. Sure enough, there on the edge of a very tiny yellow dot was an even tinier black spec. That tiny black speck was Venus. It seemed weird to me that the brightest object in the night sky (not counting the moon) was such a tiny spec. Even though I had to view this amazing event with my bare (but protected) eyes it was much more spectacular when viewed from one of NASA's satellites. Below are a series of pictures that I captured off of my computer screen as I watched Venus transit the face of the sun. It started at 3:10 and ended sometime around 10:00. How exciting.
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Venus is hotter than Mercury even though Mercury is MUCH closer to the sun.
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1 comment:
You were so funny setting the timer every 15 mins. to take pictures.
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