A GLITCH in an Alice Springs school computer briefly stopped the feed to NASA of Venus's transit of the Sun - not an accidentally cut cable in a Northern Territory town.

At 9am Telstra blamed the lost streaming of the historic event from Centralian Middle School on the severed fibre optic cable in Mataranka, south of Darwin, by a road worker the previous night.



But at 3pm Telstra discovered that the feed - which was beamed by satellite, not cable - was not affected by the cut cable.



Centralian Middle School teacher and event organiser Matt Skoss said the lost connection was at about 6.30am and was because of an IT problem with incorrect internet protocol (IP) addresses. A different proxy server eventually fixed the problem.



Mr Skoss told ABC Alice Springs early in the morning that the schools ASDN server was down - and Telstra assumed it was because of the cut cable and started working on the problem.



But the connection had been fixed by the time Telstra figured out that the NASA satellite link was unaffected.



Telstra spokeswoman Jane De Gault said: "It was too much of a coincidence to think the two were not connected".



"Everybody's resources were being used on getting things fixed."

The road work incident happened yesterday afternoon near Mataranka, 420km southeast of Darwin, and cut many Northern Territory Telstra customers south of the town - including Alice Springs and Tennant Creek.

Alice Springs was chosen as one of only a handful of locations around the world from which the US space agency was streaming live, because the town will have a view of the entire celestial event, and is often cloud free at this time of the year.

A team from Columbus State University has been in Alice Springs helping arrange the webcast from the Centralian Middle School.

Cick on the video below courtesy of the University of Queensland to watch the Venus transit live:



Streaming by Ustream



The rare sight was visible from 8.15am (AEST) to 2.30pm (CST) approximately. The most impressive moment was this morning, when Venus first intersects with the sun.

For the rest of the day we'll see a little black dot tracking slowly across the sun.



Send your photos to news@news.com.au

Doctors have warned it is important that people do not look directly at the sun without proper protection.

"Looking straight at the sun without protecting your eyes, even for a very short time, can cause serious and sometimes irreversible eye damage," Dr McConnell said. "As there are no pain receptors on the retina, people may not be aware that they are doing damage to their eyes, such as burning their retina. It is important that anyone planning to observe the transit makes sure they are wearing the correct eye protection."

He said people should use solar-eclipse glasses or filters, designed for attachment to spectacles, telescopes and binoculars.

Sunglasses, welders' masks or glasses, photographic film, x-rays, smoked glass, or cameras should not be used - they do not provide sufficient protection from UV rays.

"People can also safely watch the transit by projecting the image onto a piece of paper through a pinhole in a piece of card, while looking away from the sun," he said.

The Transit of Venus - a planetary spectacle that won't occur again until 2117 - won't be enough to significantly block the sun's light but it will give Earth's closest star a moving beauty mark. Venus is Earth's second-closest neighbouring planet.

Skywatchers in the Pacific and East Asia are set to have the best view of the eclipse.

Weather permitting, most of Australia, all of New Zealand, the nations of the South Pacific and Papua New Guinea will see it in full, and Southeast Asia, Eastern China, Japan and Korea will get most of it.

It will not be visible in Europe or Africa, but people in western North America and Mexico will see it at the end stages when the moon sets.

The transit was first observed in 1639 by English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks.

For Australia, the event is significant as Captain Cook's 1769 voyage that eventually led him here began when he was given the task of observing the transit from Tahiti.

"Culturally, for modern Australia it's a very significant event," Sydney Observatory senior education officer Geoffrey Wyatt said. "It is technically... just a little black spot on the sun, but historically it's so important for us."

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