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Venus transit May 5, 2012

Posted by
steve loos (hollister, United States) on 7 June 2012 in Plant & Nature.

An avid amateur astronomer since childhood, I was looking forward to the Venus Transit of June 5, 2012. Having spent quite a bit of time in astrophotography, so am a bit comfortable attaching cameras to telescopes.

I attached a Nikon D5100 to an Orion 80mm f7.5 telescope; the scope was on a manual alt-azm mount, and a piece of solar film was attached to the end of the scope which blocked 99.9% of the suns light.

The camera is attached to the telescope without a lens attached to the camera or an eyepiece in the telescope; the lens of the telescope is the lens for the camera. The camera is on full manual, and focus was achieved by using the live view on the camera (one great feature of the D5100 is the screen articulates.)

The big dot is Venus and the little dots are sunspots; at 3:10pm PDT Venus was just at the edge of the Sun; by 4:10pm the sun had moved well into the suns disk. Interesting stat; it would take 4 earths to fit across one of those sunspots!

Hope you had a chance to see this event; if not your out of luck as the next event is over 100 years away!

A short blog on the setup used for this photograph:

http://steveloosphotography.blogspot.com/

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I live and work in California’s central coast. Please take a moment to visit my photography website:

http://steveloosphoto.com/

Nigel from Avening, United Kingdom

Well done

7 Jun 2012 6:57am

@Nigel: Thank you Nige.

Hiro from Kyoto, Japan

Nicely captured !!

7 Jun 2012 1:16pm

@Hiro: Thank you Hiro

Tamara from Aarschot, Belgium

So interesting !!! Excellent work, thanks for sharing. Have a lovely day :)

7 Jun 2012 1:22pm

@Tamara: Thank you Tamara!

omid from mashhad, Iran

wooow!
very nice & interesting!

7 Jun 2012 6:47pm

@omid: Thank you Omid; it is a fascinating subject

Farzin from Bane-Kurdistan, Iran

I love astronomy since childhood like you dear steve
and transit of venus is one of the exiting event in my life , I love venus :-*
I will upload another shots of transit , but now I took this image
I hope to enjoy my astronomical friend
http://skyatnight.aminus3.com/image/2012-06-06.html

8 Jun 2012 8:40pm

workartframe from Frankfurt am Main / Mount, Germany

well the Venus. By Mars understand the Venus is revers. On Terra - is art, root in diagonal to the Pol.

28 Jun 2012 1:49am

Mike from California, United States

Nice to see you dusted off the astronomy gear for this one...very cool set.

4 Jul 2012 7:30pm