Transit of Venus

I went to a viewing party to see the 2012 Transit of Venus last week at Yanney Park in Kearney, Nebraska.  The party told us many stories about ourselves.

First, there’s the story of our enduring fascination with the stars and planets.  After having watched the delightful conjunction of Jupiter and Venus throughout the month of March, dozens of us were now here to watch Venus cross the face of the sun as seen from Earth.  Something is moving, I thought, but actually a number of objects are in continuous motion: Venus in its orbit around the sun, currently seen as retrograde due to our own greater orbit around that same star; Earth revolving on its tilted axis, from which we were viewing the spectacle as a tiny dot moving across the face of the “setting sun.”

Then there’s the story of our commonplace facility with material technologies.  Several telescopes were brought to the party by various groups, including Platte Valley Astronomical Observers and Seven Hills Observatory.  Each telescope was fitted with a different filter, so we could watch the event through various spectral bands.  My personal favorite was the hydrogen filter, with its fiery red signature and visible prominences, like mountains of flame protruding from the surface of the sun.  A subplot to this story was played out by a group of schoolchildren, who proudly showed off the NASA-supplied telescopes they had purchased for their school after months of dedicated fundraising.

Most important to me, however, is the story of our ability to communicate events such as this through our increasingly ubiquitous network of telecommunications media.  I was made aware of the event through National Public Radio’s mobile app on my smartphone, which provided a link to NASA’s webpage of viewing parties across the nation, from which I found the Seven Hills Observatory announcement of this event at Yanney Park.  Others had heard of the event on local radio; still others had read an announcement in the Kearney Hub.  Even just a century ago, only a very few people on Earth—a handful of astronomers and a few students of astronomy—would have known of this celestial event, and I daresay not one of them would have watched it from Kearney, Nebraska.

As Einstein once put it, “Something is moving.”  A number of things, actually.