Seeing the Venus Transit for myself.

Seeing beautiful pictures of the Venus transit Tuesday June 5 2012 is as easy as a couple of mouse clicks but I wanted to see it for myself. I've spied on a few solar eclipses through pin hole back of a box set ups over the years but I did not have time to fashion one on this day. Of course looking directly at the sun is suicide on your eyes. One web site suggested using a binocular lens to focus an image of the sun on a white surface and with only a half an hour before the sun started to dip below neighbourhood trees I managed to focus a wiggly image of the sun on our front door. I needed to set the binoculars onto something solid so I improvised a chair, shoe and the dish towel I was using to dry dishes at the time into a tripod. I was so pleased to see that tiny black dot on the suns white disk I think I shouted!

Here's the set up.

Here's the scale.

And here's what I saw.

Thank you Sandra for taking these pictures.

I guess you can tell I get excited about science! Look up the history of this event and you will see why.