2012 Transit of Venus

I watched the 2012 Venus transit with my daughter Christa and my Dad in an open field close to my Dad's house on the afternoon of June 5.  It was not a great day, with high and low clouds, threatening rain, all afternoon.  I set up with 20x50 filtered binoculars, a 120mm f/8.3 achromat with Orion solar filter, and a C8 with homemade filter, but also used without filter to project the image onto white foamboard.  The projection images in the second row look a little distorted because I had to hold the white board at an angle to the eyepiece and the camera at an angle to the white board.

Only the beginning of the transit was visible from our location in central Virginia, and in reality the increasing clouds only gave us a few minutes of an observing window.  The transit was the second in a series of two, the first of which was in 2004, and which will not occur again until 2117.  I won't be around for that one!

Here's a really good image sequence of the transit.  His images are much better than mine, but just remember that Love Always Wins!