Transit of Venus: The view of a century

From Daily Press:  Transit of Venus: The view of a century
 For retired Norfolk teacher Annette McLean and her husband, Bill, it was a chance to see "a monumental astronomical event."

For Rob Mahurin, a nuclear physicist at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, a chance to "look up at the sky and see how the world works."

For 10-year-old Cameron Coleman of Chesapeake, a chance to see something "cool."

They and about a hundred others were lured to Huntington Park Beach in Newport News late Tuesday afternoon for the chance to watch the round black speck of Venus inch across the face of the sun. They peered through telescopes of many sizes, through squares of welders glass glued to Styrofoam plates, through goggles and homemade contraptions devised of cardboard boxes, paper and basic physics.

All for the view of a century.

They gathered along a grassy expanse near the Crab Shack restaurant, nearly all of them amateur astronomers, many with the Virginia Peninsula Astronomy/Stargazers, but others just along for the ride.

Candy Whitley of Newport News wasn't quite sure why she was there. "I stay inside at eclipses," she said.

But when she read in the newspaper that Venus was due to make its rare transit, she invited her four daughters to join her at the beach. Two of them did, and brought their own kids to stand in line at scope after scope, eager for a glance or two into an eyepiece.

"It just seemed like a neat thing to do," Whitley said.

Such transits are so rare they happen in pairs about eight years apart, then don't happen again for more than a century. The last was in 2004, but bad weather made it a wash-out in Hampton Roads. The next won't arrive till 2117.

Only 53 transits have occurred over the past 4,000 years, and only six since the telescope was invented in 1608.

In 1769, astronomers stationed with telescopes at critical points around the globe marked and measured Venus' path. Those measurements helped determine the distance between Earth and the sun — an Astronomical Unit, or standard of distance, that enabled scientists to finally scale our solar system.

Now astronomers use transits to develop ways to analyze a planet's atmosphere, the better to determine the compatibility of planet atmospheres outside our solar system.

Stargazer and NASA Langley aerospace engineer Lawrence "Bird" Taylor worked several scopes, shepherding kids among them and explaining what they were seeing.

"Take a peek — isn't that wicked?" Taylor said.

Mahurin brought his daughter to see something rare. It was astronomy that first hooked him on physics, he said; discovering that the same sets of rules that operate at the cosmic level also operate at the atomic level — "The whole universal in a thimble."

"There should be 300 people out here, not 100," said Annette McLean, who along with her husband regularly encourages others to "look up — look at the beauty."

"None of us are going to be able to see this again."