The Transit of Venus 2004 credit Charles Barclay

No 8 in our list of objects is an event rather than a physical object.  An event so elusive, so transient, that you can blink – and miss it.  And yet an event so regular that the challenge to record it, and to measure it accurately, has moved empires.  This is a story of the shrinking world and the expanding universe. A story that links James Cook’s great voyage to Tahiti in the 1760s to measure the distance between the Earth and the Sun, with Removes sitting in a classroom at Radley in the 2000s using the global network to harness a telescope in Hawaii to photograph the births and deaths of stars in other galaxies.
This is the story of a hobby; of long nights spent star-gazing; of the influence of great teachers on keen pupils; of the pursuit of academic excellence outside the formal curriculum; and of an event that no one now living will ever see again. THE FULL STORY