I was keen to see the celestial event, but my confidence in BBC weather reports held me back from setting alarms and I'm pleased I did.
Something that this morning's photos of the event have really driven home for me is the three dimensions of our sky. It can become all too easy to see a dome moving around above us, each spot of light a relatively small point of interest.
But, of course, we are lost in an ocean of stars, planets and miscellaneous lumps of rock and ice hurtling through space.
It's easy to forget that the small dot that traversed the disc of the sun this last night and this morning is of comparable size to the Earth and is a world swathed in a thick atmosphere, concealing hoards of volcanoes an uninhabitable heat and pressures.
To my great displeasure I saw that Jonathan Cainer had been chiming in in the Mail's coverage of this story. Telling readers that this visible movement of Venus is benign (thank Christ, because I was expecting it to mean that new love was on the horizon, or new opportunities would present themselves to me and the rest of the world in unison), in a way that almost presented his astrological nonsense alongside the centuries-old science that has studied this phenomenon and used it for logical, scientific, useful progress.
Here are some of the best photos that I've found online...
The dismissible size of this speck reminds me of a favourite quote of mine from Carl Sagan, eloquent and awe inspiring as ever...
We are forgettable and insignificant in the universe. What a privilege it is, therefore, to exist.
Make the most of it, but don't ever think you have some divine right over all that exists, you are mere star dust that was drawn together by gravity. An infinitely humbling fact that never fails to excite me.
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