Venus Transit 2012 images!

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I rose at 3.30am and had plenty of time to get ready for the short drive to the hill I had chosen. 

There was a plate of dark cloud right where the Sun was supposed to rise!

The view not long after I arrived. 4:50am.
The cloud is slipping slowly over the horizon.

All set up: Vixen 90M f:11 refractor on my Bogen video tripod. Baader solar foil, full aperture filter. Home made, tubular camera adapter on 20mm no-name Plossl eyepiece. I was careful to balance the telescope and lock all the unwanted axes.

I practised on the gibbous moon while I waited for sunrise.
The sky was quite light but was lost to applied contrast. 

The teaser shot!
Will the cloud ever clear?!!?

The first clear view of Venus

The sun, now clear of cloud looks remarkably flattened.

Higher and brighter but still not round!

Venus is clearly headed for the limb here. 
Yet the transit is now half way through for Danish observers.
The majority of the transit was taking place below the local horizon.

Contact with tear drop effect bleeding into the solar limb.

Half and half on the limb.

The last few seconds.
The transit is almost over as thin cloud veils the sun.
Next Venus transit is in 2117. 

I really enjoyed my early morning on top of the hill. A farmer passed a couple of times in his pick-up but seemed totally uninterested in my activities. I would happily have shared the view of Venus crossing the face of the Sun.

Thin cloud was present most of the time but was lost in the glare as I clicked away with my camera. My arms were getting tired by the end from bracing the camera at the telescope. I used the telescope and my hands holding the camera to shield my eyes from the direct sun. This worked very well. The entire experience was very successful. Sadly I never thought to remove the camera to view the transit by eye power alone.

The adaptor worked perfectly. Centring the sun was very easy. Keeping the image quite still was certainly not! I just tried to be as steady as possible. Holding my breath, bracing my legs and gently squeezing the shutter button. How I wish I had made an adaptor like this years ago. Instead of continuing to use my hand-held camera method. This time I tried to keep the camera as horizontal as possible. Previous attempts at photography had all sorts of orientations.

The only real oddity was the buff colour of all my images. The Sun looks rather like a round, brown, hen's egg in most of them. This has never occurred with my other cameras. With the camera set to infinity, exposures started at 1/30 as the sun cleared low cloud. Reaching about 1/300 second towards the end. Despite trying to be disciplined I took several pictures, with a variety of zoom levels, at 5 minute intervals. I still managed 520 images. A load more with my hand-held TZ7 camera of the unspoilt, rural views.

It was rather odd to be alone on top of the low, rural hill so early in the morning. It was perfectly still. So the wildlife could be heard waking up all around me. Each taking their turn to greet the dawn. At first the traffic was solitary and sporadic on the distant main road. Becoming a fairly constant roar as the rush hour started. Thin mist lay in the hollows as I looked around my 360 degree view. The wind was non-existent. The turbines standing still.

I wore a down duvet jacket and fleece hat until quite late on. As it was cold and everything was covered in dew. Even the telescope was soon dripping wet. Though the foil filter stayed dry. My worries about the camera dewing were unfounded. It probably gained enough warmth from being handled at frequent intervals. I enjoyed an occasional sit down on a folding chair which I had brought with me. It was pleasant with the warmth of the blinding sun on my face. I left my eyrie shortly after 7am for the short drive home. But was far too excited to see what I had captured to go back to bed.

The effect of "bleaching" and rotating an image 180 degrees in PhotoFiltre.
This is the correct orientation as seen by the unaided human eye.

Please note that all the other solar and lunar images are inverted. 
While it would be easy to correct this,
the dates and times would then be inverted.
Inverting the camera would have made the shutter button inaccessible.
And, would still have inverted the date and time.
Purists may like to stand on their heads to better enjoy my images. ;ø)

Sky At Night Magazine emailed me telling me that they were going to use one of my Venus Transit images for the HotShots CD-Rom Cover Disk. (now confirmed as the September issue)


Click on any image for an enlargement
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