Tracy Asato brought his two young grandsons, a granddaughter and his grandniece to the Bishop Museum on Tuesday to see the first transit of Venus viewed in Hawaii since 1874.

"I told the parents, ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; nobody’s gonna be alive the next time this happens, so I’m gonna give them a treat and bring them down (to the museum),’" he said.

A briefly cloudy sky halted the lines at the museum for a short while Tuesday afternoon, but that didn’t bother many viewers, including Asato.

"I’m glad the sun came out and we finally got to see it," he said just after his turn at the telescope.

By all accounts, Tuesday wound up being the perfect day to view the Earth-shaped planet as a tiny dot passing in front of the sun.

Venus transits occur in pairs, separated by eight years, slightly more than every 100 years. The most recent transit occurred in 2004, but it was seen in its entirety only from the Eastern Hemisphere.

This time around the transit was best seen from the Western Hemisphere, specifically the Pacific Rim and Hawaii. Venus first popped in front of the sun at around 12:10 p.m. and concluded its pass just before 6:45 p.m. — a roughly six-hour, 35-minute journey.

Asato’s granddaughter Tiana Garcia, 7, excitedly described what she saw when she looked inside the telescope as "a little black dot and a big red circle."

"The big red circle was the sun, and the black dot was Venus," proclaimed Jaedyn Kim, Asato’s grandniece.

Tiana and Jaedyn, 8, went on to joke about who in their lineage might be the next to see a transit of Venus — their kids, their grandkids or their great-grandkids.

For perspective, if you gave birth on Tuesday and become a grandparent by that child in 25 years, your grandchild would be about 80 years old the next time a Venus transit is visible from Earth in 2117.

Several white tents filled with telescopes of all different shapes and sizes, and even some handcrafted contraptions, were situated on the lawn at the Bishop Museum, just one of several viewing sites set up around Oahu so the public could take a peek at the tiny black speck. Other sites included the Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor, Ko Olina, Waikiki and Chaminade University, all sponsored by the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy.

Gunther Hasinger, an astronomy professor and director of the institute who was stationed at the Waikiki location, said residents of Hawaii in 1874 were not able to view the transit.

Hasinger said King Kalakaua invited British astronomers to the island chain to set up observatories six weeks in advance of the celestial event, but those observatories were closed to the public when it came time for the transit because the crowd was too large and the telescopes were needed for research.

"It was just bad planning," Hasinger said. "They didn’t have the possibility we have now. We wanted to bring as many people in front of the telescopes as possible. … We wanted to redo the history."

Hasinger said UH’s Institute for Astronomy printed roughly 25,000 solar viewers to hand out to the public for free, made possible by donors. On Monday alone the institute gave away 1,200 viewers to people who walked in requesting them, he said.

Also set up at the Sunset on the Beach location in Waikiki was 12-year-old Elizabeth Coleman, a Girl Scout working to earn her silver award.

Elizabeth researched the transit, along with its connection to King Kalakaua and Hawaii in 1874, and designed information pamphlets to hand out and an interactive game.

"My dad knew about the idea before I did," she said. "He said, ‘Hey, we have this Venus transit and there’s stuff about David Kalakaua. I think you should make a project out of it.’"

Elizabeth said that ironically, though Kalakaua made such a big deal about bringing British astronomers to Hawaii to view the 1874 transit, he was unable to see it himself because he was in Washington, D.C., negotiating a tax on sugar exports to the United States.

While Elizabeth entertained viewers at her tent, her father, Paul Coleman, a Native Hawaiian astrophysicist with the institute, gave a talk at Bishop Museum about how astronomy, and the transit in particular, are important to Hawaii’s history.

Coleman explained that astronomy defines Hawaii and Hawaiians because without studying the stars, people traveling in canoes would likely have never made it here — an island chain surrounded by at least 2,000 miles of ocean in every direction.

Through the open doors of the auditorium at the museum during Coleman’s talk, the Ahuawa Place Brass Quintet could be heard playing a march written by John Philip Sousa to commemorate the transit of Venus in 1882, and a few other numbers.

When mixed with the lively, sunny atmosphere on the museum’s lawn, the bouncy music evoked a nostalgic, "once-in-a-lifetime" feeling.

Twelve-year-old Kristin Kobayashi understood the uniqueness and historical value of the event as she stood on the museum’s lawn waiting for her chance to peer through a telescope to see what humans have seen only six other times in history — the first was in 1639, roughly 30 years after the telescope was invented.

"It sort of attracted us because I’m interested in the solar system," she said. "It’s very complex, and we could study more about it and find out if there’s actual life on other planets."

"I think I’m lucky to be able to see this because it’s like I’m not gonna be able to see it again," Kristin continued. "It’ll be a story to be able to tell everyone."