Venus kisses face of the sun
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 Astronomy buffs flocked to see the transit of Venus across the sun.
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LONDON, England -- The planet of Venus has made a very rare journey across the face of the sun.
Astronomy buffs in Europe, Africa and Asia flocked to telescopes or donned special glasses on Tuesday to see the six-hour transit, an event not seen since 1882.
Looking like an intense black dot on the lower edge of the sun, Venus began its journey at around 0513 GMT. The spectacle ended at 1126 GMT.
While planetariums and observatories around the world set up telescopes with solar filters to watch the event and others provided pinhole cameras and special glasses, many amateur astronomers hosted their own "transit parties" to ring in the event.
A blue sky over Sydney gave about 40 people looking through telescopes at the city's observatory a clear view, while others gathered at friends' homes in the city to toast the journey.
This year's transit has special significance for Australians as British explorer James Cook discovered the country's east coast on his way back to England after viewing the 1769 spectacle from Tahiti.
In Britain, people began waiting in line at 6 a.m. to use telescopes provided by the Royal Observatory in southeast London.
Further north, Dr. Robert Walsh, of the University of Central Lancashire had arguably the best viewing position -- the bedroom of Carr House in Much Hoole where British astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks became the first person to observe a transit in 1639.
Rain and cloud obscured the show in Japan and Thailand. It also was cloudy in Hong Kong, but that didn't stop more than 100 people queuing up at the city's space museum, where several telescopes were waiting.
"Spectacles such this reinforce my belief that there is a Creator, and we are just tiny specks within this universe," 26-year-old Zulkarnain Hassan told The Associated Press at the National Planetarium in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
While stargazers also donned special glasses in India, Pakistan and across the Middle East, people in the northeast corner of the United States and Canada could view only the last moments of the passage.
But that did not stop about 500 people lining up in Boston to take a turn at a telescope atop the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
No individual still living was alive the last time the sun, Venus and the Earth precisely lined up.
Transits of Venus occur twice -- eight years apart -- about every 120 years.
The last pair of transits were in 1874 and 1882 and helped astronomers calculate the distance of the Earth from the sun.
Although Tuesday's transit -- and its pair in 2012 -- will carry little scientific interest, some observatories would again use the event to re-calculate the Earth's distance.
Such measurements have had enormous significance in history as they allowed scientists to properly gauge the size of our Solar System.
The transit is a rare event because the orbits of both Venus and Earth do not lie on the same plane. A transit only occurs when the two planets and the sun are on the same line.
The transit of Venus has happened only six times in the telescopic age -- 1631, 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874 and 1882.
After 2012 it is set to happen again in 2117.
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Associated Press contributed to this report.
