The upcoming transit of Venus across the sun is often mentioned in the news these days. It’s a rare event—-the next one will occur over a century from now. The last one, though, was only 8 years ago.

Back then, observatories across the world had “live” webcasts of the event. These were not video streams, but still frames taken every minute or so.

I was in grad school in those days and decided to write a script that would save those frames on to my computer. What you see below are videos from those frames—-taken from different observatories:

You can find smoother videos on Youtube.

I toyed with the idea of doing the same for this year’s transit. However, all the observatories I look at are streaming video, and no doubt the Internet will be full of such videos. It’s just not fun now that bandwidth is cheap. The Internet really has changed a lot since 2004!