Transit of Venus 2012

Weather forecast had the day of the transit of Venus as frost, so the chances were good for clear skies, and they were.  And it was pretty cold, enough to make my fingers sting whilst waiting for the bus to work and getting a shot of the moon.

It took a few shots to get the focus kind or right. Adding a little tape to the top section of my DIY Solar Filter to the lens helped stabilise the filter. The first two shots were also done on my tripod which I removed from the equation and went for hands free considering the shutter was 1/4000 f11.

My setup was my Olympus e420 (10Mp) with the 40-150mm kit lens and on the end my Solar Filter. Camera was on full manual including focus which I knocked a few times and had to refocus on most shots.

Enough of that here are the results:

I tried to get shots every 30min whilst at work, for the most part this worked. Just after the 1:15pm shot above we got a lot of cloud cover and it looked like that would be the last shot I would take. I'd even taken of the Solar Filter, but right at the end the clouds parted enough for me to get a blurry shot of the end of the transit.

For the Maximum Transit at 11:30 I left for an early lunch to check out what the Discovery Centre and Bendigo District Astronomical Society had setup for viewing. There were a couple of telescopes, two with a filter on it that allows you to see the flames coming off the sun and another that showed it similar to my shots above. The other telescope they had setup was projecting what it was seeing onto a board via the eye piece. Pretty cool and looked like this.

Almost everyone who looked at my DIY Solar Filter thought it was a real thing, a serious piece of equipment until I told them that it was made up of a yoghurt container, tape and a piece or welders glass!.