From our perspective here on earth, Venus is moving in front of the sun today. This won’t happen again for over a hundred years. NASA is posting images of the sun every 15 minutes so you can track the eclipse from your desk…

An explanation from NASA…

Today Venus moves in front of the Sun. One way to follow this rare event is to actively reload [the Astronomy Pic of the Day] during the right time interval and look for an unusual circular dark dot. The smaller sprawling dark areas are sunspots. The circular dot is the planet Venus.

The dark dot will only appear during a few very specific hours, from about 22:10 on 2012 June 5 through 4:50 2012 June 6, Universal Time.

This transit is the rarest type of solar eclipse known — much more rare than an eclipse of the Sun by the Moon or even by the planet Mercury. In fact, the next transit of Venus across the Sun will be in 2117…

Because this Venus transit is so unusual and visible from so much of the Earth, it is expected to be one of the more photographed celestial events in history.

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