SIOUX CITY, IA -
If you were born today, and lived to be 105, you would be able to witness the next Venus Transit. But for most of us, this is the last time we'll ever see Venus pass between the sun and the Earth.
"It goes in sort of a pattern where, it goes 8 years, and then 100 and some years, and then 8 years, and 100 and some years," said Dave Slaven, a Physics Professor at Morningside College.
And in 2004, Sioux City was unable to see the transit.
That's why Dave Slaven set up telescopes at the Sioux City Public Library, to let people get a view of this rare cosmic event.
The telescope projects a scaled down version of the sun on a white piece of paper and Venus is the tiny little dot in the top left corner. It's a little hard to see, because it was cloudy outside in Sioux City today, but here's what happened: Venus passed between the Earth and the Sun, a process taking about six hours.
Venus is 27 million miles away from Earth, so to us, it looks like a very tiny dot. Slaven says astronomers in the 17th century first used the Venus Transit to calculate the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
"Basically they observed it from different locations on Earth, and then based on the distance between the two places, and the amount of time between when they observed it, they were able to calculate how far the Sun is from the Earth," he said.
People from all over the world watched as Venus made its way across the face of the sun. The East Coast only saw a portion of the transit, but people further west had the best view.
