Reliving the Momentous 1882 Transit of Venus: Nearly 130 years ago today, the premier event in astrophysics involved watching a tiny dot slowly sail across the surface of the sun. That dot was our sister planet, Venus, and observing its transit as it passed directly between the Earth and sun was a momentous scientific undertaking.
And the Transit of Venus features heavily in the first part of Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon."