Sheehan and Westfall paint a picture of the history of this rare phenomenon through this year's transit as well as that of June 5-6, 2012. They interweave a discussion of its scientific significance with the stories of the people who went to great lengths to be a part of its legacy, such as Jeremiah Horrocks, the first known viewer of the transit, who began his observations a whole day early in case of inaccurate calculations; Captain James Cook, who sailed halfway around the world just to take a viewing party to an advantageous point on the globe, keeping his crew healthy on the long voyage by tricking them into eating sauerkraut; and Jean Chappe d'Auteroche, who paid the ultimate price to see Venus's tiny silhouette. A background in the history of astronomy is also provided, from the experiments of the ancients through the Copernican revolution to using radar to determine astronomical distances.

William Sheehan is the author or coauthor of a number of widely acclaimed books on astronomy, including Mars: The Lure of the Red Planet (with Stephen James O'Meara), The Immortal Fire Within (a biography of Edward Emerson Barnard), The Planet Mars, and Epic Moon (with Thomas Dobbins). The author of over a hundred popular articles on astronomy, he is a contributing editor to Sky & Telescope, a frequent contributor to Mercury, and a 2001 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for the "structure and evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy."

John Westfall is a professor of geography at San Francisco State University, the recipient of the Walter Haas Observing Award from the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers, and the author of the Atlas of the Lunar Terminator.