On Wednesday I watched a segment of the
transit of Venus at the NSW State library. The astronomic event was projected
from a telescope in Hawai’i onto a large screen at the front of a darkened
auditorium. The image of the sun filled almost the whole screen, while Venus
was a small dark disc, fairly near the perimeter by the time I got there.
I had to push a heavy door open to get into
the small auditorium. Inside, I found a handful of people, scattered across the
rows of seating. The atmosphere was hushed and respectful. One couple conversed
a little in whispers, but mostly we were silent, gazing at the screen, where no
discernible change was taking place (at least I couldn’t perceive it). I felt
as if I were in a church (or possibly a Woody Allen film – although there
didn’t seem to be any romances surreptitiously developing).
At one point a woman walked in, and having
experienced the struggle with the weight of the door, declared, “Oh, we’ll have
to keep this door chocked open.” She did so, and then proceeded to carry on an
enthusiastic and clearly audible conversation about the transit with a man who
had come in with her. They didn’t (even!) sit down, but stood in one of the
aisles. With the door open, the chatter from the café directly outside also
drifted into the room. From the other occupants of the auditorium, there was a
mute, but palpable sense of distress at this disruption. The woman was
sensitive enough to pick up on this, and upon leaving asked whether we’d like
the door closed. It was duly shut, and the hushed atmosphere of awe and mystery
descended again.
When my friend Jason arrived, I made a
whispered observation to him about the religion of science. Thinking about it
later, though, the atmosphere of devotion in the room could equally be seen as
a kind of pagan worship. After all, we weren’t making any measurements or
carrying out any other kind of scientific activity. The achievements of modern
science made it possible for us to watch the transit of Venus in this manner,
but all we were doing was gazing at an image of the sun and watching as a small
dark planet, about the same size as the earth, moved (extremely) slowly across
it.
As a visual spectacle, it was uneventful to
the point of evoking the early film work of Wim Wenders, and yet there was
something compelling and lovely about sitting in the dark with a quiet group of
strangers, united in our wonder at the workings of the solar system.
 |
| The first recorded transit of Venus in 1639 |
Although ancient cultures knew of Venus and
recorded the planet’s movements, it appears that its transit of the sun was a
discovery of early modern science. Since the seventeenth century, astronomers have
known that the transits occur in pairs, about eight years apart, separated by
long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years. The whole pattern repeats every 243
years. In 1627, Kepler was the first person to predict a transit of Venus, by
anticipating the 1631 event. However the first scientific observation of the
transit of Venus was not made until 1639. The movement of Venus we observed on
Wednesday was only the eighth transit to be predicted, and only the seventh to
be scientifically observed.
Learning these facts made the modern period
of history suddenly seem much shorter and more intimate to me. Watching the
screen in the State Library, I felt a kind of astronomical camaraderie with
Captain James Cook, who observed the transit of Venus in 1769 from Tahiti on
his way to Australia. To observe this event also made the solar system seem
more familiar in spatial terms, as if the transit of Venus were the cosmic,
scientific equivalent of a local festival designed to encourage a sense of
belonging to this particular solar system, as “our place” in the universe.
Some people say that to gaze at the stars
gives them a powerful sense of their own insignificance. This can be liberating,
but it can also tend towards nihilism, a sense that nothing we do really
matters. I don’t know what it says about the state of my ego that this episode
of star- and planet-gazing seemed to have almost the opposite effect on me – it
made me feel at home in the world.
