Transit of Venus, June 8th 2004

On the morning of Tuesday, June 8th, 2004 venus passed between the Earth and the sun for the first time since 1882.  Missed it?  Fear not, there will be another venus transit on June 6th, 2012, mark your calendars now!

So what do you do when you have a first in 122 years event and you're one piece of equipment short?  Why you improvise!  I looked high and low, Bedford and Chesterville, couldn't find my solar filter for the 80mm refractor but I could find the 12" solar filter for the lx200.  So I cut out some rigid foam insulation and retrofitted the big filter to the tiny short tube refractor.  That's my 80mm f/7 refractor with the 12" thousand oaks filter on a simple tripod.  I used my Nikon coolpix 4500 for these photos.  There was an occasional passing cloud that I needed to deal with, but they added some character to the photos.

That tiny little dot moving across the sun is Venus.  The transit started before sunrise here on the east coast, but you weren't going to catch me up at 6:05am unless I'm golfing!  The discoloration on both of these photos is the result of clouds moving across the sun.

These photos are a bit of a closeup on the "third contact" where the edge of venus touches the outer limb of the sun.  The last few centuries saw repeated attempts at timing the transit fail miserably because of whats called the "black drop effect".  When venus gets really close to the edge of the sun, a black bridge forms between the two of them making visual timing of the transit virtually impossible.  Any guesses as to what causes the black drop effect?  Email me with your guess!