Transit of Venus

Today sees the second of the pair of transits by Venus across the face of the sun for this century. The next lot will be in 115 years time. I was hoping to nick off to the Mt Stromlo Observatory during lunch, but that got sent down the drain, when I found out the manager was heading off for the rest of the day to do other stuff leaving me on my lonesome. Oh well, I'll just have to try and rig up something myself.

I was hoping that Mt Stromlo would let people take photos of it with their own camera using one of the Observatory's telescopes as I was able to do several years ago at Sydney Observatory when there was a solar eclipse (got some great photos of solar flares), but disappointingly it wasn't something they were offering.

Here's a couple of sites that let you see it or helps you to rig your own set up:

http://venustransit.nasa.gov/2012/transit/webcast.php

http://venustransit.nasa.gov/webcasts/australia/

http://nightskyonline.info/?p=3688


Well I got a nice snap of the sun disk through a rig such as that on the nightsky online page, but unfortunately, as the only binoculars I had access to here at the VIC were a pair of kids ones, with 1.5x magnification, I had no hope of the disc of Venus showing up.

Siiiiiiiiigh. A distinct Mad Scientist fail! I guess all I can do now is hope that they invent long life pills in the next few years or so.

Let me know if you had better luck than I did.