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A transit of Venus takes place when Venus passes directly between the Sun and the Earth (or any other superior planet), becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. During a transit, Venus is visible as a small black circle moving across the face of the Sun. Transits of Venus reoccur periodically.
Venus was 0.7205 au from the Sun on the day of transit, decidedly less than average. [ 9 ] Moving far backwards in time, more than 200,000 years ago Venus sometimes passed by at a distance from Earth of barely less than 38 million km, and will next do that after more than 400,000 years.
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, making a full orbit in about 224 days. Venus orbits the Sun at an average distance of about 0.72 AU (108 million km; 67 million mi), and completes an orbit every 224.7 days. It completes 13 orbits in 7.998 years, so its position in our sky almost repeats every eight years.
The synodic cycle of Venus (1.599 years) is close to five times as long as that of Mercury (0.317 years). When they are in phase and move between the Sun and the Earth at the same time they remain close together in the sky for weeks.
On 21 December 2012, the Cassini–Huygens probe, in orbit around Saturn, observed the planet Venus transiting the Sun. [3] On 3 June 2014, the Mars rover Curiosity observed the planet Mercury transiting the Sun, marking the first time a planetary transit has been observed from a celestial body besides Earth.
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At their closest point, Jupiter and Venus will be just half a degree apart – about the diameter of a full moon – despite being more than 600 million km (400 million miles) away from each other ...
The synodic period is the amount of time that it takes for an object to reappear at the same point in relation to two or more other objects. In common usage, these two objects are typically Earth and the Sun. The time between two successive oppositions or two successive conjunctions is also equal to the synodic period. For celestial bodies in ...