Transit 2004

We didn't have a lot of success with photography of the event but I have "reconstructed" approximately what the transit looked like in these pictures. The light area is part of the Sun (its too big to be completely visible) and the small black circle (or bump in the first picture) is Venus.

The picture at top-left shows the event just after first contact (when Venus is first visible on the Sun's disk). The picture at lower-right shows just before second contact (when the disk is fully on the Sun's surface). The most interesting effect is the apparent completion of the circle around the outside of Venus at second contact.

Venus looks small compared with the Sun, doesn't it? Remember the Sun is 150 million kilometers away and Venus is just 50 million so it would be three times smaller at the same distance as the Sun. Venus is slightly smaller (12,100 kilometers in diameter) than the Earth (12,700 kilometers). The Sun is 1.4 million kilometers in diameter.

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