LONDON (Reuters) - Europe, the Middle East and much of Asia and Africa will offer prime viewing next month for an astronomical event that has not occurred for 122 years -- the transit of the planet Venus across the sun.


Weather permitting, for six hours on June 8 astronomers and the public will be able to see the planet named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty passing directly between Earth and the sun.


The event has been billed as a once in a lifetime experience because the last transit was on December 6, 1882 and the next one will not occur until June 6, 2012, but will not be visible in Britain and other parts of Europe.


"Something wonderful, something marvelous is happening on June 8th and will be witnessed and experienced by millions of people all over the world," Gordon Bromage, a professor of astronomy at England's University of Central Lancashire, told a news conference on Tuesday.


"It is an extremely rare astrological event."


The transit, when Venus will appear as an intense black dot about 1/30th the diameter of the sun, will be visible in the morning in Britain, most of Europe and Africa, later in the day in the Middle East and across Russia and India and later still in the Far East, which will get a limited view.


Scientists warn people not to look at the sun with the naked eye or through a telescope or camera because it can cause blindness. A solar filter or eclipse viewer should be used and for just very short periods.

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heh, day before my birthday. AND on the other side of the world. lucky me

here's another rare astronomical event: some years back, scientists saw an asteroid heading towards earth. scared, the did math and found that it was going to hit earth 2010. they told no one. years passed and they decided to do another pile of math. this time they discovered that the asteroid would miss earth. they gleefully released to the press that the earth would not be smashed by an asteroid like they thought it would. people went

Imagine what significance the fruitbats and barmpots will read into it.

I really hope that the skies are clear on the morning of June 8. I want to capture some of the transit with my digital camcorder. I still have a couple of thick, protective sun shields that were given to me just before the total solar eclipse of 1999 August 11, so I should be able to place one of these over the lens. It would be nice to get a few seconds of footage every five or ten minutes, thereby producing a sort of "time lapse" film.

If you're in England the skies won't be clear. It'll be cloudy and you'll see nothig. Like in 99 when loads of people went to Cornwall, looked up at the clous for a bit and then went home, thoroughly pissed off. That's what'll happen, I can feel it.

Venus will appear large enough to be easily seen as a black dot silhouetted against the disk of the Sun. I know how large the Sun will appear at maximum optical zoom (x25), since I filmed the partial phase of the August 1999 eclipse through thin cloud.

By the way, although the sky was completely cloudy at maximum eclipse, I did film the landscape during totality. Unfortunately, the camcorder is very good at compensating for loss of light, so the landscape is much brighter on the film than it was in reality. I achieved better results when I included more of the sky in the shot, since this darkened the ground considerably. When I run the footage back frame by frame, I can detect the trailing edge of the Moon's shadow moving above the cloud tops.

I observed the event from the balcony of my hotel room (the Moorland Links Hotel, which is just north of Plymouth, Devon, England). The calculated length of totality at this location was 1 minute 11 seconds. It really was an eerie experience watching the light fade shortly before totality, and the strange silvery sheen over everything was very noticeable (this is due to the light fading so rapidly that your eyes cannot compensate quickly enough, which they do during normal twilight).