The planet Venus is the black spot crossing the sun in 2004. It
was photographed… (Geert Vanden Wijngaert…) The transit of Venus
sounds like a bus stop at some extraterrestrial outpost, but
it's actually what happens in the sky when the planet Venus
moves across the face of the sun. What NASA calls "the rarest of
planetary alignments" will begin Tuesday afternoon until sunset
-- and then won't be seen again for 105 years. "In a way, you
could call a solar eclipse a transit of the moon," says Tyler
Nordgren, astronomer, author and associate professor of physics
at the University of Redlands. "Venus will be moving in front of
the sun's disk." People can watch the transit for free between
3:06 and 8:01 p.m. in the coelostat (special solar telescope)
and telescopes on the lawn at the Griffith Observatory in Los
Angeles. Staff will be on hand to explain what's happening
during the celestial phenom. The observatory's website notes the
last transit of Venus that was visible in L.A. occurred in 1882.
But don't expect