PENGAMATAN TRANSIT VENUS OLEH ASTRONOM MUSLIM ABAD KE-9 SAMPAI 12

• Main Author: Dzikria
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/64660
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

The phenomenon of transit of Venus across the Sun occurs when planet Venus crosses exactly between the Sun and Earth at one of the nodes on the ecliptic plane at inferior conjunction. Since the invention of the telescope in the 17th century, astronomers have been able to observe celestial objects and astronomical phenomena, such as the transit of Venus, with greater precision. Our understanding of the transit of Venus has since grown rapidly. There have been several reports from historical records of transit observations before the telescope, but most of them were concluded to be sunspots because they didn't make sense. Among the reports are from Muslim astronomers such as al-Kindi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Bajja who stated that they had seen black dots passing through the surface of the Sun, and they suspected that this event was a transit of Venus (and a transit of Mercury for Ibn Rushd and Ibn Bajja). By using modern astronomy, Muslim astronomers' reports about the transit of Venus can be verified. In this final project, the analysis was carried out through literature and computational study using the Jean Meeus algorithm which resulted in the difference between the average observation time and NASA calculations of about 12.3 minutes for the transit of Venus on May 24, 1032 AD and 4.8 minutes for the transit of Venus on the date of November 23, 1153 AD. The result of this analysis is that al-Kindi did not see the transit of Venus but a sunspot, Ibn Sina could see the transit of Venus on May 24, 1032 AD, Ibn Rushd could not see the transit of Venus on November 23, 1153, AD, so he saw sunspots, and Ibn Bajja did not see transits of Venus but sunspots.