transit of venus

[click on image to enlarge]

Bob and Carol are friends of mine.  They teamed up to create an excellent photograph of Tuesday night's Venus Transit.  Bob is our local science guru, and he used this technique to cast the image of the sun onto a piece of white cardboard.  Carol snapped the pic with her compact point & shoot.  Theirs is the largest globe in this collage of four sun pics.  See the dot at the very bottom?  That's not the sun's bellybutton; that's Venus!

I stumbled onto the other three images while fiddling with the camera as I tried to snap a pic of the sun with my Pentax K-x, a 55mm lens, and a #850 Infrared filter.  I shot the pics in raw, cropped aggressively, and then used Picasa to try to correct the color balance.  That first picture, the magenta ring with psychedelic focal zoom is actually closer to the original, unedited pics than my yellower suns.  Again, special thanks to Carol for letting me download her photograph!

The Transit of Venus happened eight years ago in 2004 and then again just this week, but won't appear again for another 105 years.  That's because Venus' orbit has a slightly different tilt than the earth's.

Friends, I couldn't capture the kind of image I had hoped for, but it was fun to try.  I hope to fiddle around again with sun pictures and see what develops.

Keep driving, Dad!

On Halloween, S2 went trick-or-treating with my Mrs, as I drove D2 to a friend's house. She wanted to get there as soon as possible, and during the drive, heard me thinking out loud about the moon and Venus and pulling over to set up the tripod. "Daaaaad... NO!" She sounded like someone admonishing their pet. (Good grief, where's the rolled up news paper or spray bottle?) I stayed the course, and resisted the urge to stop and take a few snapshots of the unbelievable sky scape. I only captured this image, because the car was stopped, so quickly, I rested the camera over the open window and hoped for the best.

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It is a good thing too, because I don't think she could appreciate how much that meant to me, plus my old camera's disc drive was full, and it would have been worse to think I was carefully recording pictures and then find out that they weren't saved to the mini CD Rom.

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Here is an earlier picture of that sky. It was probably 5 or 10 minutes after this shot, that I saw the most expressive colors over a large field with an unobstructed view.