Sometimes, the New York Times Is Alright

As in today's thought provoking editorial on Venus crossing the sun for the first time in 122 years. Heck I didn't know until reading it that the one of the reasons for Captain Cooks voyage to Tahiti in the 1760s was to record the passage so as to better judge our distance from the sub.

Observing and timing this event was the rationale for Cook's first voyage to the Pacific. To a very real extent, we owe his journeys of discovery to the transit of Venus.

That is the way it seems to go with such predictable celestial events. They occur for reasons that have everything to do with our location, in space and time, as observers. Yet their great merit is that they cause us to lift our heads from our own sober planet and remember the solar system and the galaxy and the universe we belong to.