I was in orbit around Earth when I witnessed the 2012 transit of Venus. The planet appeared as a small, dark disk gliding across the face of the Sun—a rare event that won’t happen again until the year 2117.
The story of the transit of Venus goes back centuries, as detailed on NASA website:
There is some evidence that the ancient Babylonians saw and recorded on a tablet something about Venus and the Sun in the 16th Century B.C., but the record is not clear. It is fair to say though that Galileo Galilei with his telescope, in 1610, was the first human to actually see Venus as more than just a bright point of light in the sky.
Johannes Kepler, meanwhile, was shaking up the world with his meticulous use of astronomical data assembled by Tycho Brahe. He predicted that Venus would pass in front of the Sun on December 6, 1631, but unfortunately the transit was not visible from Europe at all.
The first recorded sighting of this transit was by British cleric, Jeremiah Horrocks, and his friend William Crabtree, on December 4, 1639—only because Horrocks had mathematically predicted it, using better data than Kepler did.
I told you, it all began long ago…
And now, the best view of the transit of Venus—seen from Hong Kong, China.
