Transit of Venus

We didn’t have welders’ goggles to safely see the transit of Venus across the sun, so we made a couple of pinhole viewers from shoeboxes. The image was so small we really couldn’t see Venus at all.

Ingenious George went to work setting up a better gizmo. He taped binoculars to a tripod and blocked out one of the lenses and some of the light surrounding it by positioning a large piece of cardboard around the binocs.

This was one of the first shots I got as Venus started across the sun.

It’s the spot down at the bottom. Lars was very interested in this astronomical wonder.

Here’s another shot, taken about 15 minutes after the first.

Then George remembered our telescope, and pulled that out for a larger view.

Venus appears on the opposite side because the telescope flips the image. Actually, George said that Venus was travelling across the top side of the sun, so I guess the image was flipped with the binoculars and flipped back with the telescope. Here’s a photo of it shining onto George’s hand. Venus is the spot at about 4:00.

These aren’t anything near the quality of the ones from the observatories, but pretty amazing what you can do at home!