Venus Transit

On June 5, 2012, planet Venus  moves across the face of the early morning sun. This astronomical oddity has played a very important role over the last few centuries in giving scientists a way to understand the size of the solar system. On December 6, 1882, the transit made the front pages of every national and international newspaper! Thousands of photographs were taken with improved calibrations. Only a few astronomers were trusted to carry out the complex calculations from the resulting data. In 1896, Simon Newcomb's value, a distance from Earth to Sun of 92,702,000 plus or minus 53,700 miles, was adopted by the international scientific community. Today most textbooks report the Astronomical Unit (or AU) as "93 million miles