Today's transit of Venus starts at 6pm EDT. Watch it. The next one is in 105 years.
Today's transit of Venus, when the planet Venus will appear as a small, dark disk moving across the face of the Sun, will begin at 22:09 UTC on 5 June 2012, and will finish at 04:49 UTC on 6 June. Depending on the position of the observer, the exact times can vary by up to ±7 minutes.
The entire transit will be visible from the western Pacific Ocean, northwesternmost North America, northeastern Asia, Japan, eastern Australia, New Zealand, and high Arctic locations including northernmost Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland.[3] In North America, the Caribbean, and northwestern South America, the beginning of the transit will be visible on 5 June until sunset. From sunrise on 6 June, the end of the transit will be visible from South Asia, the Middle East, east Africa and most of Europe. It will not be visible from most of South America or western Africa.
The moments when Venus first appears to cross the limb of the sun and the moments it leaves, known as ingress and egress respectively, are historically the most scientifically important aspects of the transit since comparison of Venus's journey viewed from different points on Earth provided one of the earliest ways to determine the distance between Earth and the sun.
The Hubble Space Telescope will use the Moon as a mirror to study the light reflected from Venus to determine the makeup of its atmosphere. This may provide another technique to study exoplanets.
The transit is also helpful to scientists today: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) will be watching the June 2012 transit to help calibrate its instruments as well as to learn more about Venus's atmosphere.
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