Venus Transit

As much as I love nature and calmness, enjoying the soft, warm, quiet breeze, there ain't nothing better than the vast amount of awesome information that is available to us via the internet. The opportunity to be informed is, without question, one of the greatest gifts we have right now. My google news page is earmarked for science and health and I love checking the daily posts. 

Because of this unlimited access we all knew about the historic celestial event taking place today... the orbit of Venus passing between us and the sun near sunset. Remember "My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas?" The mnemonic for the order of the planets... Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto (poor planetoid Pluto). Well, since Venus is between us and the sun, it just so happens that every once and a while we will be able to see Venus pass across our view of the sun... 

Well, with great publicity via the amazing world wide web, today was the momentous day of Venus' transit in front of the sun, not scheduled to happen for a little over 100 more years... I love science, I love being a teacher, I love being a science teacher and I was not about to just come home and ignore this event. Luckily I teach with 3 other high school science nerds and the Chemistry teacher loves astronomy, so he dragged out the school telescope and set up on the roof of our school library...

Have you ever tried to look at the sun? It hurts, don't do it. You need special glasses to view such an event and since we have limited access to supplies here in the DR, we set up the telescope to project its image onto a white piece of paper. Now we could all stand around and anxiously wait for Venus to appear... At 5:45 pm we were enjoying some sun spots, and by a few minutes after 6 we noticed a circle entering the upper left corner of the outline of the sun...

Dude! That is so cool!

Our location near the equator prevents us from those long summer nights you are starting to love in North America :( Our sun sets around 7 pm, so we only had 45 minutes of watching as Venus very slowing crept across our field of view. The whole transit is supposed to take 7-8 hours, but that damn spin of the Earth moves us away from the sun and we are done with our viewing.

We were super fortunate to have a clear evening! We did get a few cloud, but that only gave an eery illusion on our image...

Nature is spectacular.