Transit When Planets Cross the Sun: When Planets Cross the Sun

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Springer Science & Business Media, 2000 - 164 Seiten
Transits are rare but interesting. Nobody alive has seen a transit of Venus - the planet crossing the face of the Sun - because it last happened in 1882. The next time will be in 2004. Only Mercury and Venus orbit the Sun closer than we do and so occasionally cross the Sun's disc. Much more commonly, we can observe the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in transit, and accurate recording and imaging of these events are well within the scope of amateur astronomers. TRANSIT is in two parts. The first tells the story - always fascinating and sometimes bizarre - of the first scientific expeditions to observe transits, made in an attempt to use transit timings to accurately define the Astronomical Unit. The second part is for practical amateur observers, and explains how to observe transits of all sorts - the rare transits of Mercury and Venus, transits of the moons of lire major planets, and even transits of aircraft as they fly between the observer and the Sun!
 

Ausgewählte Seiten

Inhalt

The Moving Planets
3
Transits Why and When?
13
Edmond Halley and the Distance of the Sun
17
Transits of Mercury
23
Venus The Transit of 1639
29
The Transit of 1761
37
Captain Cook and the Transit of 1769
47
Venus The Transit of 1874
63
Future Transits
95
Observing Transits
111
Your Safely
113
Observing the Sun FullAperture Filters
119
Projecting the Suns Image
127
Observing Transits
135
Photographing Transits
147
Data Capture and Manipulation
155

Venus The Transit of 1882
71
The Story of Vulcan
75
Other Kinds of Transits
83
Appendix
161
Index
163
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Autoren-Profil (2000)

Patrick Moore was born on March 4, 1923. He is one of the most prolific authors of popular astronomy books. He began publishing astronomy books in 1950 and has been extremely active ever since. He is director of the lunar section of the British Astronomical Association and was director of the Armagh Planetarium in Northern Ireland from 1965 to 1968. Moore has been the host of a television program, "The Sky at Night," which appeared first on BBC in April 1957. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1968 for his work in astronomy. Patrick Moore died December 9, 2012.

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