Recently I travelled to an Island, separated from its distant archipelago, to watch the Transit. We had previously ascertained its visibility and packed the necessary apparatus for its observation and to record its movements. Over the past four years I had, in fact, spent more time on this island than the place of my birth or any other town for that matter – making it a familiar return but still short of any real ´homecoming´.

The constellation of arrivals to the Island prefigured that every two to three weeks the Transit would appear anew, not taking into full account its sensitivity to seasonal variations. It was decided early in the process that the documentation would best be undertaken in a more covert fashion, less so for the attention that the process may draw, but instead to ensure the constancy of the observation of its passing, the integrity of the correlation of data and its subsequent interrogation.

During the approach to the Island, I passed by the city of Trude – notable not so much for its thin air of pliability for touristic purposes, but more for the atmosphere which lacked a joyful connection to ´place´ in its well-attired residents: their thoughts focussed more by the forebearance of wealth that previously held gravity and brought the conveyance that now surrounded them and to which they grimly clung. For me, it was an opportunity to just wait, a pause where the clouds seemed to float by freely of their own volition; this was as much a way out from Trude than any real ticket of passage. Perhaps, without this, my delivery to the Island may have met a return to Trude, wherever its location may discernibly be as distinct from any other.

The Transit has surely begun and now we must determine its exact location without reliance on triangulation as a satellite to our adopted Sun, but instead drawing from the subtlety of its processional movements and attendant disclosure of its nature and multiple manifestations. The preparation of the observation room is one of the first tasks at hand, at least until the monitoring equipment is delivered to us. Until then, imagine a view of a city – asleep - from a point not above, but within, the archipelago.