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pokerfan

(27,677 posts)
Tue May 22, 2012, 03:40 PM May 2012

Infographic: Transits and Inferior Conjunctions of Venus, 2001-2242



The figure shows all 152 inferior conjunctions during one cycle of 243 years. (The formal definition of conjunction specifies that two objects have equal right ascension. This is not quite the same as the moment of minimum angular separation which is important for illustrating transits and near-transits, so the figure uses minimum separation. Most of the conjunctions occur within a few hours of minimum separation.) Everything is plotted relative to the Sun, whose disk is the orange circle at center left. The colored bars show the path of Venus for about 10 hours surrounding the moment of minimum separation, and I used a cyclic 5-color palette to show the 5 groups of conjunctions in each 8-year cycle, starting with the conjunction in March 2001 (the first magenta bar in the upper right). Each bar is labeled with the month and year. The font is a bit small (but readable if you zoom the figure to 100%) to avoid too many font collisions in dense parts of the plot. North is up and east is to the left.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/Some-Details-About-Transits-of-Venus.html
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