(AP) HONOLULU - Filtering the sun's light to a minuscule fraction of its true power allowed sky-gazers around the world to watch a silhouetted Venus travel across Earth's closest star, an extremely rare spectacle that served as a reminder of how tiny our planet really is.

After all, the next transit is 105 years away - likely beyond all of our lifetimes but just another dinky speck in the timeline of the universe.

"I'm sad to see Venus go," electrical engineer Andrew Cooper of the W.M. Keck Observatory told viewers watching a webcast of the transit's final moments as seen from the nearly 14,000-foot summit of Mauna Kea volcano on Hawaii's Big Island.

From Maui to Mumbai, Mexico to Norway, much of the world watched the 6-hour, 40-minute celestial showcase through special telescopes, live streams on the Internet or with the naked eye through cheap cardboard glasses.

"If you can see the mole on Cindy Crawford's face, you can see Venus," Van Webster, a member of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society, told those who stopped by his telescope for a peek on Mount Hollywood.

For astronomers, the transit wasn't just a rare planetary spectacle. It was also one of those events they hoped would spark curiosity about the universe and our place in it.

Sul Ah Chim, a researcher at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute in South Korea, said he hoped people see life from a larger perspective and "not get caught up in their small, everyday problems."

"When you think about it from the context of the universe, 105 years is a very short period of time and the Earth is only a small, pale blue spot," he said.

The transit began just after 6 p.m. EDT in the United States. What observers could see and for how long depended on their region's exposure to the sun during that exact window of time, and the weather.

Those in most areas of North and Central America saw the start of the transit until sunset, while those in western Asia, the eastern half of Africa and most of Europe could catch the transit's end once the sun came up.

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Transit of Venus viewed around the world