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09 June 2004
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Wednesday
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20 Rabi-us-Saani 1425
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Venus makes rare transit across Sun
LONDON, June 8: Venus dazzled astronomers and stargazers around the globe on Tuesday as it made it first transit across the Sun in more than 100 years.
Until 0519 GMT, no living person had viewed the rare phenomenon first seen by British astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks in 1639.
From Sydney to the pyramids and western Europe, people armed for the occasion with pinhole cameras and special dark glasses gathered for the celestial show. Venus appeared as a small black dot on the lower edge of the Sun at the start of a transit that ended about six hours later.
"We are watching the first transit of Venus since 1882," said Dr Robert Massey of Britain's Royal Observatory in Greenwich as more than 100 people thronged the courtyard of the London landmark to witness the phenomenon.
Banks of photographers with telephoto lenses and television crews captured the event. People queued patiently as parents lifted small children to gaze into telescopes set up in the courtyard of the observatory on a clear, warm morning.
Others used special glasses handed out by staff to see the event. At Cairo's ancient pyramids, a school group viewed the rare phenomenon at the burial tombs of the civilization that many experts believe charted the stars thousands of years ago.
"The pyramids are the perfect place to watch something so rare as Venus in front of the Sun," said 15-year-old Wissam Adel Kamal, one of the about 60 students who came equipped with specially filtered glasses.
RIGHT TIME, RIGHT PLACE: Scandinavian airline SAS offered dark glasses to about 3,500 travellers on Nordic flights to witness the transit above the clouds that covered sections of northern Europe.
On the other side of the globe in Australia it was already afternoon when 40 amateur astronomers gathered at the home of Jos Roberts north of Sydney. "I feel very privileged to be alive at the right time, to be in the right place, to have no clouds or monsoons," said Roberts who toasted the event with champagne with his colleagues. -Reuters
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