Transit of Venus, 8 June 2004

The weather could have been a lot better, but here's an image snatched at around 9am (0800UT) through thin cloud from Edinburgh. It was generally a fairly poor morning weather wise (and I was in a meeting most of the morning anyway).

This is a view looking down into the simple projection box, which is made from three copier paper box lids, four battens and a pair of binoculars. The binoculars are wedged between two lids with holes for one objective and eyepiece, and there's a decent distance to the card to give a reasonable sized projected image. I'll take a picture of the apparatus another day.

This is from the same image, with just the Sun (and Venus!) cropped out and the contrast enhanced. Not too bad, considering that the assembly was being held in one hand whilst I clutched the camera and pressed the shutter with the other.

Reminds me of my old solar observing days - I used to use a projection box on my old 3 inch refractor to observe sunspots regularly from 1969 to 1972, and remember watching the transit of Mercury on 1970 May 9. (What an anorak - I still have the drawing of the Sun for that day!)