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Our Local Transiting Planet: Venus
06.05.2012
crowd at NASA Exploration Center in Mountain View
A few thousand people gathered at the NASA Exploration Center at NASA Ames Research Center for the final opportunity of the century to witness a transit of Venus.
On June 5, the Kepler team led and participated in many events where the public could observe a transiting planet directly with their own eyes: Venus! Viewers saw Venus as a small dot slowly drifting across the golden disk of the Sun.

See

Using the transit method, the Kepler mission has identified 61 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates during the spacecraft's first 16 months of observation from May 2009 to September 2010.
photo inside the Exploation place theater area
Kids of all ages gather to share Venus' last transit of the century— at NASA Ames Research Center
Sunspotter device for viewing the Sun
A Sunspotter at an observing event at Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley CA. The Sunspotter is a device for viewing the Sun. It has a folded optical path specially designed for safe viewing of sunspots, and on June 5, the transit if the planet Venus. Photo by Diane Tokugawa.
Close-up view of the image of the Sun with a Sunspotter, showing the black dot of Venus and smaller dots, the sunspots
Close-up view of the image of the Sun with a Sunspotter, showing the black dot of Venus and smaller dots, the sunspots. There were several very nice sunspot clusters to see during the Venus transit event. In exoplanet discoveries "starspots" are fairly easy to distinguish from the characteristics of transiting exoplanets. Photo by Diane Tokugawa.
People lining up to see transit through a telescope.
Kepler Co-Investigator for Education and Public Outreach Alan Gould shows magnificent images of the transit to hundreds of appreciative transit watchers through a Questar telescope with solar filter. In back of Gould is a table with solar filter-fitted binoculars for viewers to use. Photo by Diane Tokugawa.
Telescopes fitted with high quality solar filters for public viewing of the transit of Venus at NASA Ames Research Center.
Telescopes fitted with high quality solar filters for public viewing of the transit of Venus at NASA Ames Research Center.

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