Word: venusized
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...January; the paths of two such remote bodies are very tough to calculate accurately. Only when the august Harvard College Observatory confirmed Taylor's calculations did the occultation of Regulus become a serious concern of world astronomy. The U.S. was ruled out as a major observation point because Venus and Regulus would be close to the eastern horizon with the sun above them. With help from the U.S. Air Force and Boeing Airplane Co., Harvard sent trained observers with elaborate light measuring devices to France, Spain, Italy and Lebanon; other astronomers in South Africa and Asia set up watch...
...group of U.S. astronomers peered at the sky with astronomers' telescopes that can see planets and stars in bright daylight. Headed by Dr. Allen Hynek of the Smithsonian's Cambridge Astrophysical Observatory, the scientists were in Spain to take full advantage of a rare event. The planet Venus, 55 million miles from the earth in the solar system, was passing directly in front of the bright star Regulus in miniature eclipse, and though the two were 400 trillion miles apart (67 light-years), the star's light would enable them to poke deep into the atmosphere...
...hour of 2 p.m. universal time* approached, Venus looked like a yellow half-moon against the sky background, and Regulus, greenish in hue, was approaching the rim of its disk. The occultation was to start at 2:21. The minutes passed; the star edged closer to the invisible rim of the planet. "No change, no change," chanted Hynek into a tape recorder while an assistant read off the time. "Gosh, there-it seemed to go. It's definitely going, going. It's gone." Eleven minutes and 4.8 seconds later, Regulus reappeared from behind the bright edge of Venus...
First Magnitude. Those brief seconds of gradual fading and slow reappearance were the reason for all the excitement. When the earth's airless moon occults a star, the star winks out instantaneously. But Venus has an abundant atmosphere, and so a star that it covers fades slowly, its light changing and diminishing like the setting sun. Careful observation is sure to tell volumes about the Venusian atmosphere, its density at various heights, its temperature and chemical makeup...
Astronomers, who consider the planets as prospective real estate for the space age, have longed for years to see Venus occult a bright star. But such events are extremely rare. Venus looks big because of sunlight reflecting brightly from its faintly yellow cloud deck; actually, to earth-bound observers its disk is never larger (usually much smaller) than a golf ball seen from a distance of 500 ft. As the tiny sphere creeps slowly across the star field, it occasionally covers a faint star, but not once since the invention of the telescope 350 years ago has it covered anything...