Transit of Venus – Pictures

The Transit of Venus is over, and since I didn’t want to wait 105 years to see it, I hauled out the telescope and watched it yesterday. Here are some pictures.

It was a very nice day – sunny and cool with a clear view of the sun. The telescope I used was a little Meade ETX-80 AT-TC with electronic positioning, 80mm refractor with a 400mm focal length, no filters.

At 4PM local time I pointed it directly at the sun and used its eyepiece to project the image onto a white piece of paper, viewing the image indirectly rather than burning out my eyes looking directly into the eyepiece.

Right away I could see a beautiful image of the sun projected onto the paper with very clear sunspots. Perfect! Now I would have a beer and wait.

At exactly 5:04PM CT Venus appeared on the sun’s disk as a little black notch on the edge. It moved quickly across, and within 10 minutes, as the telescope tracked the sun, Venus was completely within the disk, about 1/32 the size of the sun.

Because I had set up viewing in my front yard which is surrounded by tall trees, I only had 45 minutes of viewing time before the telescope and myself were in shadows, and the sun was behind the trees.

I’ve seen this once before and had the same reaction – awe and wonder. This has absolutely nothing to do with Online Backup, and I am not going to try to make a poetic connection. I just thought you might like to see the pictures.

 

Rob Cosgrove is the President of Remote Backup Systems, founder of the Online Backup Industry, and a vocal advocate for maintaining the highest standards in Online Backup software. His latest book, the Online Backup Guide for Service Providers: How to Start and Operate an Online Backup Service, is available online now, on Amazon.com, and at bookstores.

Remote Backup Systems provides brandable, scalable software and solutions to MSPs and VARs enabling them to offer Online Backup Services.