Transit of Venus - 8th June 2004
Nehru Planetarium, New Delhi new Transit observing primer
new Transit timings for every city, town and village of India
On the 8th of June 2004, will be seen a historic transit of the planet Venus, across the face of the Sun. No one alive has so far seen such an event. Venus transits are very rare; the last this happened was in the year 1882. And this event was not visible from India - the last India saw a transit of Venus was 8 years prior to that, in 1874.
It may also be of interest, that, one of the first few observations in history, of transits, was done on Indian soil - by Jeremiah Shakerely, in 1651 - when he observed a transit of Mercury across the disk of the Sun, although he did not manage to make scientifically useful observations. Prior to this, there had only been observations by Gassendi, of the Mercury transit in 1631 and the important observations by Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree, of the Venus Transit of 1639. It was also on Indian soil, at Muddapur, that an Italian expedition, during the 1874 transit of Venus, for the first time, made spectroscopic measurements confirming the existence of an atmosphere on Venus.
Three Indian Astronomers Samanta Chandrasekhar, Chintamani Raghunathachary and Ankitam Venkata Narsinga Rao, are also associated with the observations of the 1874 transit of Venus.
Samanta Chandrasekhar, of Orissa observed the 1874 Transit of Venus and reported about it, in his Siddhantic Astronomical treatise - Siddhanta Darpana.
1874 Transit observations of Samanta Chandrasekhar
Raghunathachary seems to have had made preparations for the observations of this event and even printed a booklet in Urdu, preparatory to the transit. However, he does not seem to have submitted his observations after the event - perhaps he was clouded out?
Narsinga Rao, on the other hand, who owned a private observatory at Visakhapatnam, did observe the transit of 1874, with a Cooke Equatorial of 6 inches aperture, equipped with a drive for tracking, and submitted his observations to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, where they appeared in the issue number 35, in 1875. Weather was not favourable for the first two contacts, but, he did observe the egress completely.
1874 transit observations of Ankitam Venkata Narsinga Rao
Our date with Venus, then, is the 8th of June, 2004.
Nehru Planetarium, New Delhi, has started a group site to discuss issues related to the observations of Venus Transit in 2004, continuing with plans for the 2012 Transit, discussing transits in history and literature, in fact, anything under the Sun and above it, related to transits. The group will also be used to co-ordinate other transit observations and activities.
Visit the group at :-
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VenusTransit
Some significant discussions from this group
Simple understanding of AU determination using transit
Planned Activities - Earth Radius measurements
March 29 Elongation measurements
Analemma Activities Geography!
(We are indebted to didaktik.physik.uni-essen.de/ ~backhaus/VenusProject.htm for some of the ideas for planned activities)
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