Thursday June 10, 2004

Here are two photos from my attendance at Harvard's Festival of the Transit of Venus as described here.

Here is the telescope used by John Winthrop to observe the transit in 1761:

For fun, I tried taking a shot of the Sun with my Sony Cybershot DSC-P5 3.2 MP digital camera with 3X optical zoom. I did this by setting the focus to infinity, setting the camera to maximum (optical) zoom, holding my solar filter glasses directly in front of the lens, and snapping the shot. I've massively cropped the image and applied level corrections in Photoshop Elements to create the following. It won't win any awards, but I was gratified to see that even this crude approach caught a glimpse of Venus. It's the dot near the Sun's rim at about 3:30 on the dial.

Stay tuned for the next transit in 2012! (2004-06-10 08:35:59.0) Permalink Comments [0]