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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 and Earth come the closest, but they come less often closer than Venus and Mercury . [ 10 ]
After waiting for most of the day, he eventually saw the transit when clouds obscuring the Sun cleared at about 15:15, half an hour before sunset. His observations allowed him to make a well-informed guess for the diameter of Venus and an estimate of the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun (59.4 million mi (95.6 million km; 0.639 AU)).
When Venus lies between Earth and the Sun in inferior conjunction, it makes the closest approach to Earth of any planet at an average distance of 41 million km (25 million mi). [4] [note 3] [168] Because of the decreasing eccentricity of Earth's orbit, the minimum distances will become greater over tens of thousands of years.
Careful observations of the 1769 transit of Venus allowed astronomers to calculate the average Earth–Sun distance as 93,726,900 miles (150,838,800 km), only 0.8% greater than the modern value. [291] Uranus, having occasionally been observed since 1690 and possibly from antiquity, was recognized to be a planet orbiting beyond Saturn by 1783. [292]
Distances between the planets in the Solar System are often measured in astronomical units (AU), defined as the average distance between the Sun and Earth, some 1.5 × 10 8 kilometers (93 million miles). Venus, the closest planet to Earth is (at closest approach) 0.28 AU away. Neptune, the farthest planet from the Sun, is 29.8 AU away. As of ...
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 ...
Average distance from the Sun — Venus: 0.72 — Average distance from the Sun — Earth: 1.00 — Average distance of Earth's orbit from the Sun (sunlight travels for 8 minutes and 19 seconds before reaching Earth) — Mars: 1.52 — Average distance from the Sun — Jupiter: 5.2 — Average distance from the Sun — Light-hour: 7.2 ...
This diagram shows various possible elongations (ε), each of which is the angular distance between a planet and the Sun from Earth's perspective. In astronomy, a planet's elongation is the angular separation between the Sun and the planet, with Earth as the reference point. [1] The greatest elongation is the maximum angular separation.