Nindaranna, Ishtar, Jin xing, Chak ek or Aphrodite... are different names of the same thing, known as a planet Venus today. Because Venus is the third brightest object in the sky, it was always very popular with many observers. First written record about it comes from a famous Babylonian library of Ashurbanipal, from the period around 1600 BC, but probably it was painted on ceilings of Egyptians tombs as an important part of the night sky much more earlier. For majority of ancient nations Venus was with its bright white a symbol of goddess of love and beauty; for ancient Mayas it represented Quetzalcoatl, a god of wisdom.
Most
probably the first people, who looked at the world around through “scientific
glasses”, were ancient Greeks. Although they preferred exploration
of physical phenomena on the Earth, they were also interested in observing
the sky. Thanks to this interest in observation of planets behaviour, Heraclides
Ponticus proposed that both Venus and Mercury probably rotate around the
Sun not around the Earth.
Hand in hand with Middle Ages a long break in scientific exploration came. Astronomy was reduced to theological interpretations only and the church successfully killed every attempt of free thinking. This situation was steady for a long time. But despite initial troubles science was getting stronger and stronger and in the end it finally won. Outstanding mathematicians like Copernicus and Kepler can be considered the pioneers of a new wave in scientific exploration. Significant occurred an attempt of Galileo Galilei who used the telescope for the sky observation in 1606. Besides many other observations Galileo studied the planet Venus, but he was only able to distinquish phase changes of the planet, nothing else.
Although his followers had much better facilities, they were not successful more than him. Instead of beautiful details of Mars landscape , they saw only the same mysterious face the former goddess of love. Enthusiastic scientists started to think of many theories and they came to a conclusion that Venus must have a thick cloud formation and a big ocean. Although nobody could have been sure that Venus really had an atmosphere, every educated astronomer of 18th century had known that Venus represents a planet full of water, fertile soil and full of life. The atmosphere was discovered in 1761 during one of Venus transits, the enthusiasm of that discovery lasted for 50 years until 1920, when spectroskopical analysis of the planet light negated the presence of water and confirmed only CO2 as a dominant element.. The end of hope about finding paradise on this planet finished with space probes. Comparing to them Venus is completely opposite. In our imagination we can compare it to the hell with heat, lava, SO2 rain and immense atmospheric pressure. Nothing interesting for our generation but maybe for the future one…Who knows? Some ideas about possible terraformation have already appeared…
Venus transits across the Sun disk since the invention of the telescope
- 1631 - observable only in the south-eastern Europe
- 1639 - 4th December, Jeremiah Horrocks probably became the first one, who had ever seen Venus transit
- 1761 - this transit was calculated by Kepler, according to his astronomical tables made for the Czech king Rudolph II. The effect of a black drop was observed for first time. The distance of the Earth - the Sun was determined 125-153 million km.
- 1769 - observed by 150 people from 80 different places, AU was elaborated to 153 340 000 km, with a mistake of 3% (AU = 149 597 870,691 km).
- 1874 - first photographs of Venus transit were made
- 1882 - other measurings and photographs