Name: Transit of Venus! Sydney 2012 Contacts, Contracts and Parallax
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T18:53:01.000Z
Duration: 5 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

There are very few things that will get me out of bed in the morning before eight o'clock.

Transition words & phrases

But the transit of Venus is one of them, because this is the last time it's gonna happen in my lifetime.

So I don't have to worry about this becoming a regular thing.

Okay, so the transit is probably starting right now.

The sun is now out, and with these silly glasses, you can actually see Venus on the sun.

I imagine most people don't get excited about Venus passing in front of the sun.

But in the old days, it was a really important event because it allowed us to determine the scale of our solar system and then the scale of the universe.

Astronomers at the time knew the relative distances between the planets because of Kepler's laws that could calculate the ratios of the different Rady I of the orbits of planets.

But unfortunately they didn't have any absolute measure.

So they couldn't really say how far anything was from anything else.

The guy who the comments named after was the one who suggested that by timing how long it takes Venus to pass across the face of the sun from different points on the earth would allow us to measure the distance between the Earth and the sun.

Now to illustrate Parallax, I've actually kind of set up a solar system in my kitchen and living room so you can see the sun there behind me.

Aaron, you know what's going on with some space and rocket center?

This is Ah, yeah, because we're on opposite sides of the globe.

We're gonna compare times and calculate the distance of the sun.

My time was six hours, 28 minutes and four seconds in Sydney.

My mind was six hours 45 minutes and 36 seconds.

All right, So do I just go put it on a calculator?

So the plan is I'm going to shoot from the earth from the top of the earth and see what it looks like when I make a transit of Venus across the face of the sun.

And then I'm gonna change my perspective slightly, so I'm gonna go to a lower part of the earth and I'm gonna shoot the same thing.

And then I wanna overlay those two images to see how Venus looks as its tracking across the sun from those two different locations.

It should trace out two separate cords across the face of the sun.

And that is what allows us to estimate the distance to Venus and the distance to the sun and everything else in the solar system.

Because once we have one absolute distance, we could get all of the distances.

So 243 years ago, Captain Cook was down here sent to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus, and after that he opened his sealed papers with his secret mission.

He was meant to find the great Southern land and claim it for Britain, which is what he did.

He mapped and explore the coasts of New Zealand and Australia before returning home.

This was his first voyage to the South Pacific.

So pretty exciting And then, I guess, kind of a related note.

Eight years ago when this transit was taking place, I was actually in the air over the Pacific, flying from Vancouver to Sydney.

You know it's destiny calling back to the distance.

Not I don't think that's a unit, is it Miles?

It's about 149 and 1/2 change 1,000,000 kilometres.

Space and rocket center under the Saturn five.

But there was a kid there that made his own telescope out of PVC pipe.

I wish I could make a telescope at a PVC pipe.

So I'm gonna put an annotation over to that video of Destined.

If you want to go see Destin's video where you can make your own telescope, but a PVC Yeah.

You better get to bed, you know, going crazy.

Yeah, I need some sleep, so I'll let you go.

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Transit of Venus! Sydney 2012 Contacts, Contracts and Parallax

perspective

awesome

determine

scale