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Archive for June 5th, 2012

Venus transiting the Sun

June 05, 2012 @ 22:15 By: gordon Category: Astronomy, Out and about, Photography

imageI decided to ride my bike to the pub trivia session this evening so that I could hopefully see Venus transiting the Sun, something it won’t do again until 2117.

My setup was very simple: my Canon SD850IS point-and-shoot and a piece of #14 welder’s glass.

Basically, I held the #14 glass in front of the lens and hoped for the best. The challenge was getting the camera to focus properly. I was happily surprised to see that the first picture I took was the best one. Other than cropping the image, I haven’t done any processing or enhancement.

If you look closely, you can see the little disc of Venus just clockwise of of the 12 o’clock position. The photo was taken at 18:18 Eastern, which was about 9 minutes after the start of the transit.