Transit of Venus 2004: On June 8th, 2004 at 11:25:29 UTC the Transit of Venus (4th contact) was observed by Astronomers and Engineers at the US Naval Academy on Farragut field at the location N38 58.64 / W76 28.84. Equipment used was a 10 inch meade reflector and camera obscura made from a 6 foot cube communication shelter with pin hole in door. Perfect skies. Photo at left shows Astronomy Professors Albert and Katz and former midshipman Hale (82) of comet Hale-Bopp fame. By the time of Sunrise on the East coast of the US, the transit was mostly complete with only the 3rd and 4th contact remaining as Venus exited the disk of the Sun. We had monitored Ham Radio for contact with other observers but no one else was heard on AMSAT net 14.282 MHz. Time was 7:25 AM EDT.

This Transit Of Venus across the face of the Sun was the first occurrence in more than a century. Unlike eclipses, this event has only been witnessed by humankind 6 times in the past, and this was the first ever since the invention of Radio to allow instant comparison of observations from around the world at the speed of light. We had hoped to use Ham radio to link observations from other interested Ham Radio operators around the world for instant display on APRS and for sharing this experience.

CAMERA OBSCURA:In addition to the modern Meade Telescope we wanted to reproduce the technique used by 17th century observers to observe the sun. This consisted of a pin-hole in the side of a darkened room. In this case, we used a communications shelter with a small pin-hole in the door as shown below. You can clearly see Venus to the lower left of the Sun's disk:

The Transit of Venus is a fascinating event historically as it gave early astronomers the first mechanism with which to actually measure the distance from the Earth to the Sun and confirm their underestanding of the size of Venus. During the 6 hour or so event, there are 4 critical times as shown below. These instances will occur at slightly different times for observers at different Earth locations because of parallax. But generally begin at 0513z and end at 1126z.

The parallax due to the separation of different observers will give enough differences in the observations to make meaningful measurements of the geometry of the event.

Naval Academy Team: Since this once-in-a-lifetime event will mostly only be visible in the Eastern Hemisphere except for a few minutes after sunrise on the USA East coast, the plan had been to take a team from the US Naval Academy lead by Professor Jim Huddle on an Innovations In Travel cruise ship going up the Nile. Another team lead by Professor Elise Albert was headed to the Mediteranian with your's truely. But the ship contractor went out of business.

Some History: Many people don't realize that the mission of Captain Cook's 'round the world voyage in 1769 was to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti.. (and secretly to lay clam to Antarctica if it existed)... Anyway, since it took him 3 years to complete his voyage, it took a while to collect these observations from other corners of the globe and then without computers or accurate global time, or any means of distance communications it took years for the data to be assemilated and analyzed.

Radio and Wireless: Fortunately, for this 7th Transit of Venus, we can take advantage of another momentous discovery in Physics heralded by Marconi at the turn of the last century. His demonstration of the long distance communications capabilities of Radio waves in 1902 will add a new dimension to the Transit event by offering, for the first time in human history, the ability to witness the event simultaneously from excursions to the four corners of the world via the miracle of electronics communications. The map below shows the areas of the Earth where the Transit will be visible from the beginning (between the red lines) to the end (between the yellow lines). Observers between India to Germany have the potential to see the complete event.

Communications: My participation in this event is to lead the Amateur Radio community into using the invention of radio to herald this event from all corners of the globe. We will use links via ionospheric propagation (HF) and satellite to share the event between the numerous excursions that will be taking place on that day throughout the world. Here are some of the ideas in work to develop support for this event: