Venus Transit: Last in our lifetimes

[sad_winslow]

Today for the last time in the next hundred years, the planet Venus crossed in front of the Sun. Did any of you make it to see?

There was an event at my community college to check it out, so I went. They had filtered telescopes, eclipse glasses and filter glass to peek through, and a pinhole projector. I can post pics if anyone is interested. It was very cool. A nice day of admiring something that we tend to take for granted, that big lightbulb in the sky that sears our pasty internet flesh and burns our LCD-tender eyes.

[monster]

yup.

[limey]

please.

[ZenGum]

Saw it through a pinhole device I made, but there was a bit of hazy cloud in the sky (amongst opaque patches) and I'm not really sure if the dot I was making out was really Venus.

[TheMercenary]

Nothing but clouds in our part of the country. Would have loved to watched it first hand. But with the advent of digital photography it seems that eventually some science nerd somewhere will post fantastic pics. So I guess it was no great loss missing it.

[Blueflare]

Nah. I'll catch the next one.
Nanobots will flood our bloodstreams fixing us up so I'll be positively a spring chicken at 127.

Also, I could not be bothered to get up at 5am. I know someone who did and it was too cloudy to see it anyway.
I got a good sleep and missed nothing.

[ZenGum]

Ehh, you wouldn't have seen it like this, anyway:

[glatt]

I made a little projecting device with a huge sheet of cardboard and a pair of binoculars. The sun went behind the clouds just as I finished it. But I was ready. When the sun came out for almost a minute an hour later, I was outside with the wife and kids, and I got a good 10 seconds where I had found the sun through the binoculars and projected the image onto a sheet of white cardboard, and got it into focus. The black dot of Venus was clearly visible by the edge of the sun. We all saw it. Very cool. If I'd had another minute or so, I would have taken a picture, but the clouds filled the gap of clear sky again, and the sun disappeared.

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Nothing but clouds in our part of the country. Would have loved to watched it first hand.

Ditto

Originally Posted by Blueflare

I could not be bothered to get up at 5am. I know someone who did and it was too cloudy to see it anyway.
I got a good sleep and missed nothing.

Ditto

And ta for the photos.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

Ehh, you wouldn't have seen it like this, anyway:


Attachment 38965

Great pic! Thanks for posting that one.

[Gravdigr]

I put eyeballs on it, but all my picture-taking was for naught. No one I know was even slightly interested.

Just FTR, I saw the one eight yrs ago, also.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Good on you, Gravedigr. I caught it also. Will crosspost from another forum I frequent.

How many people need a more explicit pop-culture ref than to say "King of Pain"?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

The crosspost.

Last one for over a hundred years! Now from today, Venus appears as the Morning Star, after its stint as the Evening Star and its spectacular dance from earlier in the year with Jupiter, whooping down from South to West as our Earth lapped it.

Wow, am I ever glad I made the minimal effort to observe it! Minimal effort read as "drive to Moorpark College and find the VCAS set up by the campus observatory," even if the VCAS website said nothing about whether they'd be observing or not. I figured they wouldn't miss something like this -- well, they didn't. If they had, Griffith Observatory would have been the next stop!

Observing conditions were excellent, and the "seeing" was steady. I got to eyeball our Sun through solar filters over scopes, many of them, of a lot of different apertures. Eclipse glasses were much in use, the wife and I have two pair from an old issue of Astronomy magazine. A transit of Venus is just barely a naked-eye object for me -- at the very limit. It went in and out of visibility, and if I didn't know it was there I'd've easily missed it. Other observers with keener eyes could pick it up readily. But there were moments when the black dot there could be picked up by my aging Mk I eyeball. I needed a telescope to teach me it was there for sure. I tried projecting a sun image through a pair of 7x50 binoculars -- handheld is not good enough. Pinhole camera setup, same thing; lacked magnification.

They warn against catastrophic failures or other accident with solar filters placed over the objective of any scope, from things like heat buildup cracking filter glass. There were no failures. All the filters were plastic film. Some cautious folks -- rightly so -- taped their filters in place, and good for them.

I got to observe the sun disc through one fellow's solar scope with a hydrogen-alpha filter to it -- LED red, and you could pick out the sinuous lighter forms of solar prominences. Thanks, Hal, that was way cool and you're a gent. And thanks, Terence, for offering to email me your multiexposure pics of the event once you have the images shopped all together.

Of sunspots, there were a few. Less than a dozen. Couple of biggies a bit toward the Sun's southern limb. Venus passed near to a curving string of smaller sunspots that looked like a reversed image of the Hawaiian Islands. You can't confuse Venus' solid disc with the splodgy shapes of sunspots, at all, and it was bigger than any of the spots. I did not notice any solar prominence closely associated with a sunspot, not by eye anyway.

When the sun got low, everybody who'd been observing since three Pacific time packed up their gear. Even with the sun low, the atmosphere was still calm and the sun not swimming around much if at all. But such increased atmosphere effects as we got pretty well ended any un-magnified observing for me; it had been easier when the sun was higher.

Okay, I can check this one off my Bucket List. Only time I'll ever mix a transit of Venus with a primary election. 8)

P.S.: Oh yeah -- only thing that could have made it better would have been "King of Pain" played on repeat on somebody's car player.