| I had a fantastic time today. A whole bunch of people got a look through my scope, and I got a view through a Televue Pronto equipped with an H-alpha filter. A few minutes after sunrise, while the sun was still fully in the haze on the horizon, a number of sharp-eyed observers managed to see the silhouette of Venus with the naked eye. Not me though...my eyesight sucks! Thanks goes to Guy Nason who scouted this excellent site (for last year's transit of Mercury no less), and to the weather gods for finally giving us GTA folk a break in the clouds just in time for the transit! | ||
A view to the east not long after sunrise. |
Another shot of the sunrise, a few minutes after the previous shot. |
By sunrise, the scopes were out in force. At top right is the 20-day old waning gibbous moon. My scope is the white one on the left, behind the green lawn chair. |
A group shot of many of the people enjoying the transit, silhouetted against the sky. |
Another silhouetted group shot, this time of a bunch of people on a perilous corner of the bluff! |
A view to the north showing a number of people and their scopes quite close to the edge of the bluff! |
Transit at 6:34am EDT, about half an hour before 3rd contact. |
Transit at 7:03am EDT, minutes before 3rd contact. |
Transit at 7:05am EDT, mere moments before 3rd contact. There is a slight hint of the "black drop effect" that plagued timings by astronomers of centuries past. The black drop effect was much more noticeable a few seconds later, but I didn't get a shot of it. |
Venus at 3rd contact, at approximately 7:06am EDT. Ross Eddie, who was close by with a rather popular shoe box projection screen, had a shortwave radio and indicated his estimate of 3rd contact to be at 7:05:25am EDT. |
Venus at about 7:10am EDT, shortly after 3rd contact. I used a different camera for this shot. For some reason I've been able to get much better pics through my scope with the Kodak DX3900 compared to the Canon A70, even though for everything else the Canon is the far better camera. The DX3900 has an alarming number of faulty pixels, which I subtracted with a dark frame. I counted at least seven, though fortuitously none of them were on the Sun! |
A snail on a tripod shortly after the end of the transit. Apparently the snail was placed at the eyepiece of the scope attached to that tripod, making that snail the first ever to witness a transit of Venus! |
