Today is the day, the last contact just over minutes ago, and of all the pictures in the Venus Transit 2004 Gallery, this is the one elected to go to Kindergarten today for Show and Tell to cover the June topic of "The Sun and Sun Safety".

I'll tell them it's three things, one starts with Sss, one with Vuh, and one with Err, and we live on one of them ...

We got the thing about occultation and transit and why it takes so long and why the dot is so small and all that, no problem -- kids these days already know that Saturn is not the only gas giant with rings -- but I'm not sure he really grasped the parallax idea with our little experiment involving my thumb over my T-Shirt and him covering alternate eyes; there was something really confusing about why it should look like a shadow on the sun when clearly shadows flee the sun, and the diagram of the two 'shadows' seen by different observers, that just kind of tore it -- sure enough, notice in the Gallery how even the 10 year old artists show the event from only one observer.

this simpler of the diagrams also went in the Show and Tell bundle,
pesky second shadow and all ...

So we watched the movie cycle a few times, checked out some animations and poked at the VT 2004 Kindergarten Page -- no question, the ESO VT 2004 takes the top honours; early results, by the way, say a very good time was had by all and in case you're interested, the 2108 participating observers say stars in the sky are 0.033% closer than we think

Last time this happened, there were no cars or trucks, only horses and buggies, and there were no airplanes, only hot-air balloons.

Then how did people fly? ... long pause ... Did they have boats?

There was no Guinness either, but I suppose Kindergarten doesn't need to know that. Next time it comes around, both these kids will be thinking about high-school (the transits always travel in pairs) but the one after that will be for their grandkids' show and tell.

A year and a half younger, having seen the same videos and heard the same stories, Kaelin had a completely different take on this whole story of things defacing his local star. He chose his picture thinking the telescope was a cheery playground teeter-totter, and then when it cleared the printer, became quite concerned about the whole matter. Like it was a thunderstorm, not out of fear, but out of prudent factual caution, he wanted our glass-door shut, no one goes outside, kept the lights off "in case the power goes out", stayed in the basement, coming up periodically just to ask, "Is it over?" and only then went merrily on his daily Kaelin way.