The observing station in Lyndonville Vermont. The transitting planet can be clearly seen in real time on the laptop screen beneath the telescope in the foreground. In the center, astronomer Phil Brents operates a Canon digital camera on an 800mm telephoto lens. In the background, Chris Sampson processes the digital images. [Photo: Paul Martinez]
By Phillip Brents
Science Editor
Sunday, June 6, 2004
BOSTON, Mass. - Rain. An astronomer’s worst nightmare.
After a five-hour transcontinental flight, our team -- myself, Star-News photographer Paul Martinez and intern Christopher Allen Sampson -- arrived at Logan Airport, a very wet Logan Airport. We had traveled 3,500 miles for clear skies and instead wound up trading the gray morning onshore flow of Southern California for equally gray skies enshrouding Boston and all of New England.
As we passed over Lake Erie, the state of New York promptly disappeared beneath a layer of clouds. Our goal for observing the first transit of Venus since 1882 had been New England. Only the northeastern part of the United States afforded the best viewing opportunities -- both in terms of length of time the planet spends on the sun’s disk and the altitude of the sun above the horizon during what will be a once-in-a-lifetime event for our modest observing group of three individuals.
A transit occurs when a planet that orbits between the Earth and the sun passes directly in front of the sun as seen from Earth. Transits of Mercury, the innermost planet in our solar system, are faily common, happening about 13 times each century. But those of Venus are more rare -- only two transits per century are afforded by geometry. Moreover, the two transits occur eight years apart.
The last one occurred 122 years ago; the next one will take place in 2012.
During the 2004 transit, Venus will take a total of six hours to cross the southern portion of the sun’s disk. The event will be visible from all of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. From eastern North America, the sun will rise with Venus already in transit. The further north, the longer the second planet from the sun will spend on the sun’s disk.
From Maine, Venus will spend more than two hours on the solar disk after rising just after 5 a.m. At egress, or the point where Venus will leave the solar disk, the sun will stand 25 degrees above the horizon.
From western New York, Venus will spend 90 minutes in transit; from Louisville, Ky., the transit will last about an hour. From St. Louis, the sun will rise with Venus essentially departing the sun’s disk.
Our plan had been to travel to the northeastern part of the United States to take advantage of optimum conditions. But the weather forecasts were for the rain that we encountered upon landing in Massachusetts to progress eastward across Maine.
We have one day - and likely a radius of 800 miles by rented car -- to find a suitable place to observe the transit. Possible locations include western New York - hopefully now cleared of rain -- or the mountains of Vermont and New Hamphire a few hours to the north or Maine to the east. Time will be spent Monday watching weather reports - and determining which direction our odyssey will take.
Monday, June 7, 2004
Concord, N.H. -- After reviewing weather reports, we decided to take a day trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire located about 200 miles away. Mt. Washington Valley is a holiday paradise for New Englanders. The mountains themselves are a green and granite paradise, with Mt. Washington being the tallest peak at more than 6,000 feet. A cold front was expected to move into the region on Wednesday, with thunderstroms expected. We figured if any clouds did move in early that elevation might be our saving grace.
A chance lunchtime exit off Interstate 93 in Concord changed all that when we stumbled into members of the New Hampshire Astronomical Society -- and not a moment too soon. As we were searching for burgers, we saw a sign pointing to a planetarium and decided to forget about lunch and pursue this interesting and quite unexpected lead. Was there something already set up for the locals? A gold mine, we thought.
The planetarium turned out to be the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium located on the campus of the New Hampshire Institute of Technology. A schoolteacher from Concord, McAuliffe perished in the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion and the facility was constructed in her honor. As we arrived, the facility's staff was moving telescopes for the morning's big event. One group was to observe at Hampton Beach on the state's Atlantic Coast -- following the event from sunrise over a flat horizon afforded by the Atlantic Ocean. Another group, headed by resident educator R.P. Hale, was to observe from the top of a bell tower at St. Paul's School in Concord. Hale even hoped to catch Venus silhouetted against the solar corona after final contact with the sun's disk.
We were invited attend both observing groups but decided to push northward on our expedition to the White Mountains -- the site of the alleged UFO abduction of Betty and Barney Hill more that 40 years ago as described in John G. Fuller's spell-binding book "Interrupted Journey." Though we were not victims of missing time, we did end up at the Canadian border in Vermont by sundown. As we passed through the White Mountains, the skies began to clear and we had decided to keep going. The plan was to crash at a rest stop a mile south of the border -- smack dab on the 45th parallel -- and monitor the weather throughout the night. At 4 a.m., we would be ready to move in whatever direction to guarantee clear skies.
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Lyndonville, Vermont -- We did it ... though we had to outrun a fast-moving cloud bank that decided to move in at the most inopportune moment. With sunrise at 5:07 a.m., we motored south on Interstate 93 for about 25 miles until we had to stop to set up our equipment -- a 4.5-inch short tube reflector telescope mounted with a webcam and four other cameras to record the event. A Rite Aid parking lot served as our makeshift observatory. The clouds followed us but we had outrun most of them. Our pressing problem was the ridge of trees that stood directly between our station and the rising sun.
All New England, it seems, is covered by trees -- so thick that you can barely see a few feet into the forests that pan out from both sides of the freeways and disappear into a green carpet along the horizon. While we found mostly clear skies, we had to wait nearly 40 minutes for the sun to rise above the ridge, leaving us with about 100 minutes of observing.
But once the sun finally cleared the last few tree tops, the view was spectacular. The protective filters we had placed over our instruments worked to perfection. While Venus was well on its way toward exiting the sun's disk, the black dot silhouetted against the yellow limb was extraordinarily large. Venus is only 1/32nd the diamter of the sun but still looked impressively large to the eye under magnification at one arcminute of celestial measure. We followed the planet on the last fourth of its journey across the solar orb, watching on a computer laptop (showing the planet at about 100x) as it made a 20-minute exit -- first tenously touching the edge of the sun's disk and then taking a bite out of the sun's edge as it sped along its orbit past the Earth.
We shot more than 300 digital images between us, plus 12 separate webcam captures (each averaging about 300 frames) totaling more than two gigabytes of information.
Our hunch to go northward paid off as clouds and fog, from early reports, apparently wiped out views from along the Atlantic Coast and lower inland elevations. Our reward?
We had seen something that no one alive today had witnessed.
A trip through Maine and a stop ton see the Atlantic Ocean occupied our way back from Vermont. A planned sightseeing trip to Niagara Falls and a quick excursion into Canada to get our passports stamped on Wednesday should round out our East Coast expedition.
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