At http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/tim-cullen-the-secret-astronom… … is a post by Tim Cullen, The Secret Astronomers Other Ball, April 20th. On the 5th and 6th of June this year there will be a Transit of Venus and scientists expect it to be a feast of settled science (and the author provides a list of names of past scientists that each brought something to the table). Tim Cullen looks at some of the science – the stuff they are avoiding. Basically, this is the magnetic mysteries. In 1997 Venus was confidently described as having practically no magnetic field – yet Venus does support a magnetosphere and this is generally described as an induced magnetosphere because the solar wind seems to interact with the ionosphere of Venus, unhindered. However, it is the magnetotail that is most interesting as it is permeated with structured magnetic fields and exhibits a double lobed structure, somewhat like Birkeland currents. Another surprise about Venus is that it has an ion packed tail that stretches 45 million km out into space – large enough to slap the Earth in June when the two planets are in line with the Sun. The tail is somewhat like the ion tails of comets. For example, Comet Hyakutake was found to have a tail that stretched half a billion km across the solar system.
In addition, the Moon plays a role. It is said to have no dipole field, no magnetosphere and only a superficial magnetic field, a hundred times smaller than that of the Earth. Cullen compares this with the slight magnetic field of Mercury – yet Mercury has an extended exosphere referred to as its magnetosphere. The Moon also has an exosphere but it is called a sodium tail – yet it looks exactly like a magnetosphere. The Moon and its tear shaped sodium tail take 6 days to traverse the Earth's magnetotail and during this 6 days some strange things happen – lunar dust storms and electrostatic discharges. When the Moon is full it is inside the magnetotail, taking 3 days before it is full and 3 days after it is full to cross and exit on the other side. During the crossing the Moon comes into contact with a gigantic plasma sheet of hot charged particles trapped in the tail. The Moon's surface is peppered with a negative charge from electrons and on the day side these electrons are brushed away by photons but on the night side of the Moon the electrons accumulate and voltages can climb to 100s and 1000s of volts (source of information, a NASA spacecraft from 1998/1999). Now, from a catastrophist point of view it is interesting to note that earthquakes appear to be more common around Full and New Moon and in early June the Full Moon will coincide with the Transit of Venus – so tides may be high (but will there be a major tectonic event?)
PS … one of the commenters quotes a section from Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision page 177, a hymn of Ishtar (who he assumes equates with Venus). The author of the piece, Tim Cullen, actually quotes Holoscience in the bibliography. While all this can be seen as part of the doomsaying associated with 2012, it is a fact that Peter Fairlie-Clark has been telling us at SIS that the Transit of Venus has been an important catastrophist marker in the past and he has pointed out its occurrence on this year too. We shall see what we see.