Venus Transit

Yesterday afternoon Bruce came home a little early so we could go to the polls together to vote.  Also, yesterday afternoon Venus passed in front of the sun.  Both of these events converged quite nicely.

Photographer: Tom Ruen

Bruce gets very excited about anything astronomical.  On the way to the polling station, he spotted a gentleman who'd set up a very large telescope in the back parking lot of our little Copperopolis town square.  We stopped on the way back and the man happily let us look through the lens.  Amazing!  What we saw looked very much like this image (copied with permission) from the Internet:

There it is: the sun, a few sunspots, and the dot that is Venus.


So, when we got home, Bruce was all jazzed about Venus, astronomy, photography and telescopes.  Not having a fancy-schmancy telescope like the nice man in the town square had, he went out behind the house and made do with what he had.  The following is the image that he photographed and his own commentary which he emailed to me:

Photographer: Bruce Winningham

"Here’s the result of our playing “Backyard Astronomer.” The black dot in the upper right is Venus. The dark smudges are actually the cloud layers in the atmosphere. They prevented a good view of the smaller sun spots.

Set up was a pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod projecting the image onto a piece of white paper. Now that we know what we’re doing (koff-koff), we’ll be ready for the next time in 105 years."



I think it's amazing that Bruce's picture using nothing but field binoculars on a tripod, while certainly not of the clarity and caliber as the ones using a strong telescope, is still in the ballpark.  Even with his much more primitive technology, he too got a picture of the sun (which is skewed only because the wind was whipping the little piece of paper he held like crazy) and the dot that was Venus. 

So there you go!