Meet the century before the sun

Wednesday morning the Venus will be visible for the last time for 105 years as a black dot on the ball of fire.

The British navigator James Cook sailed to Tahiti in 1769 to attend to the spectacle. For out of the South Seas was on 3 June of that year very well to see how a black dot moved across the blazing bright solar disk - Venus, the second planet in the solar system and our inner neighbour. Next Wednesday, it will be easier to watch these so-called transits of Venus; we have to get up very early on: From 4.58 clocks, the event could be seen from Hamburg. Open, however, whether the weather will play along: Currently, light cloud cover predicted.


If the view is free, you should not look at the sun with the naked eye and certainly not with an ordinary pair of binoculars or a telescope, because this can cause serious eye damage. Eclipse glasses would offer security, says Stephan Fichtner, spokesman for the Hamburg Planetarium. The facility offers a special service to its observation deck to watch the space fans travelling through telescopes with special filters available.

If you missed the show, it will probably never be able to watch again. The next Venus transit will be on 11 December 2117 and will probably take place in Europe not to look, until 8 December 2125 would have our descendants the chance to experience Venus special appearance. Finally, the event took place on 8 June 2004, before that, on 6 December 1882nd Although Earth and Venus encounter on their journey around the sun every 584 days, but their orbits are inclined to each other by 3.4 degree. It so happens that Venus is in 99 percent of all cases are not exactly between the Earth and the sun moves, but passes above or below. In a perfect line with the earth and sun is twice the distance of eight years, but then again only about 100 years later.