For those who can’t wait for over 100 years for the next one – you can watch the current transit of Venus live on ABC here.

I bet Captain Cook would have preferred this armchair astronomy! Then again we might not all be here in sunny rainy Sydney if he hadn’t been asked to come out here posthumously by Kepler to help calculate the Astronomical Unit. I bet they were a bit annoyed, after all that effort, to find out the distance between the earth and the sun was simply 1.