Venus at superior conjucntion - the anti-transit

It's been interesting following the progress of Venus toward superior
conjuction over the last few weeks in the images from SOHO. It has now
appeared in the LASCO C2 view, and will apparently pass behind the Sun in a
few days. I was thinking of this as an anti-transit, when I realized we were
almost exactly halfway between the last transit of Venus (6/8/2004) to the
next one (6/6/2012). Given that the orbits of Venus and Earth are nearly
circular, it makes perfect sense that at this halfway point, Venus would be
almost exactly on the far side of the Sun. I love it when I find a bit of
order in the Universe.


--
Robert Welch
Alamdea, CA

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 21:58:34 -0700, "Robert Welch"
wrote:

It's been interesting following the progress of Venus toward superior
conjuction over the last few weeks in the images from SOHO. It has now
appeared in the LASCO C2 view, and will apparently pass behind the Sun in a
few days. I was thinking of this as an anti-transit, when I realized we were
almost exactly halfway between the last transit of Venus (6/8/2004) to the
next one (6/6/2012). Given that the orbits of Venus and Earth are nearly
circular, it makes perfect sense that at this halfway point, Venus would be
almost exactly on the far side of the Sun. I love it when I find a bit of
order in the Universe.

I looked at a simulation of this anti-transit on the Starry Night
planetarium program and found that Venus is behind the Sun from
approximately 05h UT on June 8th until 02h UT on the 10th, so almost 2
days. It would obviously be quite a bit longer than the 8 hour maximum
duration of a frontal transit, but I was slightly surprised at the
length of time it spends behind the sun. Also, these anti-transits
occur every 8 years from 1976 to 2048.

Dave W.