I was hoping to get a live viewing of the Transit of Venus today. It would have been the only one in my lifetime, because the one in 2004 happened at night in the place on Earth I call home and it's more than a century before the next one after today.
Sure, not much happens. Just a small black circle taking more than six hours to meander across the face of the Sun. And there's a multitude of ways to see it on the Internet.
But I was hoping to see it for real, low-tech, the way almost every other Venus transit has been observed. There's something connecting with a rare natural event with the technology stripped away.
But nature had its way today.
Instead we got snow. Fricken SNOW. In a coastal city that averages one minor snow day every four years, and got two of them last year, and almost never gets snow this early in winter. When it was dazzling sunshine just two days ago, and is forecast to have fine sunshine again tomorrow.
I live in a location that would have been ideal: Christchurch, New Zealand (the city damaged by earthquakes in 2010 and 2011) gets the transit approximately from 10:15am to 4:45pm. My son was excited - until school was closed for the day - that he was going to have a school field trip to the local University for a live viewing (weather permitting, heh) and lecture on the history of the transit and its particular relevance to us down under in New Zealand.
[I'm not going to bother consulting Wikipedia or anything in what follows, it's all from memory, apologies for any errors in history or science.]
You see, the transit of Venus has a close connection with the European exploration of the South Pacific. In 1769 it was a big deal in scientific circles for the transit that year to be timed from various locations on our planet, to ascertain a more accurate estimate of the Astronomical Unit: the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun. That was achieved, with less accuracy than was hoped but still reasonable success, producing a new estimate of around 153 million kilometres - give or take a million.
One of the most famous journeys to view that transit was the British expedition of Captain James Cook on the Endeavour to observe the event from Tahiti in the Pacific ocean. But it turns out that wasn't the only mission he was given. Now, the French and British had been at peace after the Seven Years war for a few years by the time the Endeavour set sail, but it still would have been a very difficult diplomatic situation if the Endeavour voyage had been for anything beyond strictly scientific goals. (The French actually claimed Tahiti as a territory while the Endeavour was en route to it, and any hint the Endeavour was to perform territorial exploration of the South Pacific would have risked reigniting conflict.) So Cook and his crew made it to Tahiti, observed the transit of Venus in June 1769, and only after that did he open secret orders revealing he was also to explore the area where Abel Tasman had sighted land more than a century earlier. You know, just while he was in the neighborhood!
The Endeavour located New Zealand, landed at several locations and produced a remarkably accurate map from a complete circumnavigation. In so doing, Cook was also able to observe a transit of Mercury from New Zealand - at a place that is even today called Mercury Bay - five months after being in Tahiti for the Venus transit.
Perhaps that historical journey explains a little of why I would have wanted to see this myself. Not just on a screen seeing a live feed from a telescope thousands of miles away, amazing enough as that is. Instead, outside my house today it looks like this.
So if you get a chance today to see it for real - forgetting for a moment our technological achievements, that we live in a world where telescopes on orbiting satellites can photograph light from galaxies and superclusters that has travelled billions of years to reach us, that we can use distant quasars to measure our own planet wobbling by mere inches as it rotates - think back to 243 years ago when many scientists travelled long dangerous journeys to see this event, not just for the spectacle of a small black circle wandering across the face of the Sun but to make important measurements to understand our place in the universe better.
And have a glimpse for me. I'll be making a snowman with my kids. Which happens a lot more often than every hundred-odd years, but is still a special moment too.