I'm not really a solar system imager, but who can resist an opportunity that happens only twice at 100+-year intervals? I set up in the back yard and figured I might have an hour and a half through partly cloudy skies. Actually, I had about ten minutes of open sky, and I shot about ten single frames. These are my best. I planned a number of ways to image this but at the last minute reverted to the method I began with years ago in astro-imaging: eyepiece projection through a ClearVue 30mm eyepiece, a camera adapter, and my now-ancient Sony DSC-75. This foolproof system allows me to focus visually and then screw the camera onto the adapter. The camera then autofocuses on the image that the eyepiece puts up.
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| After about ten minutes, the clouds moved in. |
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| And then in some more. |
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| And then the view totally clouded over. Notice there are no shadows in this last image. This is the SV80ED with the WO diagonal, ClearVue eyepiece, and adapter, mounted on the EM-10. I removed the camera so I could take a picture of the scope. Of course, others took some wonderful images of the transit (one of my favorites is Rory's: here), and they are all over the web. I'm happy to have seen it. It's pretty cool to think of the sun 93 million miles away and Venus about 26 million miles away, and one moving across the other from our line of sight. |
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