Observing the Transit of Venus

The transit lasted six hours and forty minutes. Mike maynell remembers, they only had a window of half an hour at sunrise before venus would be out of sight for the next 100 years. The skies were completely leaden with cloud it didn't look very likely that we would be able to getto to see the transit at all. With ten minutes to go, all of a sudden, the disk of the sun just peeped through the clouds. But things weren't looking up on blackheath common in london.