Transit of Venus was a big success.

I probably spent to much time trying to get some of my telescopes ready before hand and didn't spend enough time getting handouts for people. I could not believe how fast the three hours went by.

After thinking the clouds would ruin the event, they all started to part 20 minutes before the transit. This kind of put a rush on some of our setup plans, so we were a little less organized than we could have been.

I hope all the visitors had a good time, I know we did. Purchasing the baader solar filter film and making a few solar filters ahead of time helped out some, the binoculars we had that were adapted for safe solar viewing had new filters I made in the past few days. The extra filter on Johns large telescope gave a nice yellow tint to the sun and nice views. Sandra had her meteorite collection with her and was showing it to some in the crowd. Sandra and Tim were inside the observatory much of the time. Greg Ozimek was out and about taking a bunch of photos with his Camera. James French spent a lot of time helping out setting up his computer for the live NASA feed, helping setup the screen and ran the small telescope with solar project and re-aimed the large solar projector. He was basically doing the work of multiple volunteers. The event was very fluid, with many things happening. I had four cameras to capture different aspects of the event. An iPhone, a Fujix 3d camera, my Canon T1i, and a Sony HD cam to try to get a couple short video clips. Just juggling the cameras and chatting with the crowd kept me busy. The handheld 10 by 50 binoculars worked out well with the safe solar filters, people could pass those about. Venus was much bigger and more visible than I thought it would be though those 10 by 50 binoculars.

We had a lot of fun viewing the transit of Venus.

We had between 300 and 400 visitors by one estimate.

More photos to follow and more details.

For now here's the one photo I took through the hydrogen alpha telescope with my canon T1i. This was handheld through a 15mm eyepiece.

There were 50 people in line waiting when I snapped this photo so I didn't have time to focus and take a lot of photos at different exposures.

I modified this a little, just bringing out details using a curve filter in the Filterstorm application, then blew it up a little and took a screen shot on my iPad before posting it here.

Greg




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