On Wednesday, 6 June 2012, the world celebrated a rare phenomenon known as the Venus transit. During this transit, Venus is seen as a black dot moving slowly across the Sun’s disk. Venus transits occur in pairs of events separated by about eight years, and these pairs recur every 105.5 or 121.5 years. The reason for the rarity of Venus transits is that the plane of Venus’ orbit is tilted at a small angle to Earth’s orbital plane.

In Egypt, it was observable from sunrise at 5:00 a.m. and lasted for around 100 minutes. The Planetarium Science Center (PSC) organized a public observation session to celebrate that event at the BA Plaza. The Library visitors watched the Venus transit through special instruments, under the supervision of astronomy specialists, from 6:00-6:50 a.m.

This will be the last Venus transit in the 21st century. The next pair of Venus transits will be the transits of 10 December 2117 and 8 December 2125.