Witnessing a rare sight

The students of CMRIT gathered on their college campus in the wee hours on Wednesday morning, to witness the century’s last Venus transit. 

The faculty of the college set up a refractor telescope (with objective lens of focal length 100 cm and eye lens of 5cm) on the college campus for the students to witness the rare astronomical phenomenon. 

Though clouds were intermittently causing obstruction, students were curious to learn that this event will happen again after 105 years.

Prof Kamal Kumar, mathematics professor, was happy to learn that Galileo and others could find the sun-earth distance from this experiment.

The students were an excited lot. Nivedita, a seventh semester student who watched with solar goggles, said, “Venus looks like a dot. It’s an amazing sight.” 

Raveesha K H, professor of physics, said, “this event turned out to be an opportunity for the engineering students to learn that almost 400 years back Galileo had begun to study this phenomenon and in fact, he had predicted this event to happen in 1632.”

The event also had students learn to make a simple telescope and carry out astronomical experiments.