Page:A short history of astronomy(1898).djvu/350

284 which rendered practicable an entirely different method of finding the longitude (chapter, § 127).

227. The astronomers of the 18th century had two opportunities of utilising a transit of Venus for the determination of the distance of the sun, as recommended by Halley (§ 202).

A passage or transit of Venus across the sun's disc is a phenomenon of the same nature as an eclipse of the sun by the moon, with the important difference that the apparent magnitude of the planet is too small to cause any serious diminution in the sun's light, and it merely appears as a small black dot on the bright surface of the sun.

If the path of Venus lay in the ecliptic, then at every inferior conjunction, occurring once in 584 days, she would necessarily pass between the sun and earth and would appear to transit. As, however, the paths of Venus and the earth are inclined to one another, at inferior conjunction Venus is usually far enough "above" or "below" the ecliptic for no transit to occur. With the present position of the two paths—which planetary perturbations are only very gradually changing transits of Venus occur in pairs eight years apart, while between the latter of one pair and the earlier of the next pair elapse alternately intervals of 105$1⁄2$ and of 121$1⁄2$ years. Thus transits have taken place in December 1631 and 1639, June 1761 and 1769, December 1874 and 1882, and will occur again in 2004 and 2012, 2117 and 2125, and so on.

The method of getting the distance of the sun from a transit of Venus may be said not to differ essentially from that based on observations of Mars (chapter, § 161).

The observer's object in both cases is to obtain the difference in direction of the planet as seen from different places on the earth. Venus, however, when at all near the earth, is usually too near the sun in the sky to be capable of minutely exact observation, but when a transit occurs the sun's disc serves as it were as a dial-plate on which the position of the planet can be noted. Moreover the measurement of minute angles, an art not yet carried to very great perfection in the 18th century, can be avoided by time-observations, as the difference in the times at which Venus enters (or leaves) the sun's disc as seen at