Transit of Venus 2004 - www.venustransit.ie

Indeed, when I went around Tullamore yesterday evening to hand out the Transit flyers and posters for shop windows, no one I handed them to knew what was going on! So, I spent about 3 minutes telling each of them!

{thanks for those too, Albert, I also stuck 1/2 A4 page on the bottom of each poster with details of TAS's meeting on June 7th}

I told them how it is not as rare as the Martian event last August, but no one has seen this type of event since 1882, therefore, it could be even more rare than Mars, as you can see Mars in a telescope or by naked eye, every year... A Venusian Transit takes 120 years!

Now, they're curious, and some even said that they will more than likely come to TAS's meeting on the evening of June 7th, despite being a bank holiday, to find out more, and if weather permits to see the sun projected prior to the meeting.

Its what I have always believed is the best way to promote things like this - grab their curiosity, tell them what they want to hear, and show them what they want to see. Dress it up a little!

Seanie.

Dear colleagues,

we have further updated the VT-2004 website and are getting closer to
completeness.

The Central Display is ready in lay-out and most of the links are active.
Some of the pages behind it will still be completed within the next few days
(Weather, etc.). We have placed a first video from the occultation at the
Video page and you will also find the latest map with the locations of the
observers that participate in the VT-2004 Observing Campaign. We have just
rounded 800 and the number continues to rise rapidly.

We have also inserted links to the VT-2004 Basic Image Processing facility
that is now available to everybody! Digital images frequently contain more
information than is obvious at first glance. We want to help observers in
getting the most out of their digital camera images, in particular those of
the Venus transit. The facility
( proxyon.asu.cas.cz/~venus/ ) has been set up at the Ondrejov
Observatory (The Czech Republic). Here all interested may submit their
images and have a variety of well documented operations performed on them.
The results are immediately displayed on the screen. We trust that this will
be of continued use to observers, also long after the Venus Transit is over.
The links were inserted on the top page, on the pages for Amateurs and
Education (Students and Teachers), as well as on two of the pages in the
"How to Observe" area.

We continue to receive many photos and, recently, more drawings for the
Gallery. We do our utmost to put the best ones on the web as soon as
possible, but due to other work, delays of 1 day (exceptionally 2 days) may
happen.

We expect to issue the next Press Communication (No. 5) on Friday 28. 5 or
Monday 31.5. I hope that we will have some new statistics on the web load
soon, but with the recent switch over from two to five servers here at ESO,
the system has to be correspondingly adjusted.

Kind regards,

Richard West

Richard West

That name may be familiar to many of you as the discoverer of Comet West (1975 v1). www.eso.org/~rwest/

cheers,
~Al

Someone on TV saying this is a spectacular astronomical event is a little boring compared to someone saying that if it wasnt for the venus transit in 1769, Hawaii would not have been discovered until later, or raising more romantic notions evoked by Harkness in 1882

"We are now on the eve of the second transit of a pair, after which there will be no other till the Twenty-First century of our era has dawned upon the earth, and the June flowers are blooming in 2004.... What will be the state of science when the next transit season arrives God only knows." (American astronomer William Harkness in 1882).

Cheers,
~Al

Al,
any idea onine where I can find more references like these in relation to previous transits? How was the AU determined and when?

Seanie.

any idea onine where I can find more references like these in relation to previous transits? How was the AU determined and when?

The extended infosheets on vt-2004.org should have all you need:
www.vt-2004.org/Background/Infol2/

There are some anmations at www.vt-2004.org/animations/ which may be of use for exaplaining the event and the parallax effect if you need it for a talk.

Cheers,
~Al

Got them, thanks Al.