South Africa 2012
The drawings on South Africa’s attractive transit of Venus mini sheet are based on sketches made by the German astronomer Daniel Fischer to demonstrate the technique of
measuring the distance of Venus during a transit. On the central stamp, the
widely different tracks of the transits of 2004 and 2012 cross the orange disk
of the Sun. As it happens, the 2012 transit of Venus was not visible from South
Africa, although the 2004 one was.
The sheet’s designer, a South African art student called Wessel Booysen, explained that he
wanted to ‘bring across the science behind calculating how and when the transit occurs
through suggestion that the whole process had been sketched with an ink quill
in an old notebook’. He added a modern touch by use of what he termed various ‘stained and grunge paper textures and vector imagery’. The wording at the top, bottom and right edges of the stamp was printed in
metallic orange ink, but shows up black in this scan.
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