Venus Transit 2012

Guided by hand

The 2012 transit of Venus, when the planet Venus (opens in a new tab) appeared as a small, dark disk moving across the face of the Sun (opens in a new tab), began at 22:09 UTC (opens in a new tab) on 5 June 2012, and finished at 04:49 UTC on 6 June. Depending on the position of the observer, the exact times varied by up to ±7 minutes. Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable celestial phenomena (opens in a new tab) and occur in pairs, eight years apart, which are themselves separated by more than a century: The previous transit (opens in a new tab) of Venus took place on June 8, 2004 (preceded by the pair of appearances on December 9, 1874 and December 6, 1882), and the next pair of transits will occur December 10-11, 2117, and in December 2125.

s