On June 5th, 2012, I took off work to watch the transit of Venus. It's not a spectacular event, but it is an exceedingly rare one. The most recent ones for example occurred in 1769, 1874, 1882, 2004, and most recently in June of 2012. The next one won't happen until December of 2117. Here's a photo I took that day:
That photo was taken with a higher-end Kodak point-and-shoot with, I think a 20X optical zoom. At the time, I didn't have access to good solar filters, so this photo was taken through the magnetic/plastic film of a 3.5in floppy disk.
A note of warning: It is unsafe to view the sun in that manner. You can cause serious retinal damage or your camera's sensor could be damaged.
I did have a pair of paper eclipse glasses obtained from Amazon, and used them for range-finding and casual viewing over the 2.5 hours of the transit. The long duration of the transit, along with good weather meant that this transit was very forgiving to anyone photographing it.
This is what got me looked on transits.
Next post:
All about the solar transits
That photo was taken with a higher-end Kodak point-and-shoot with, I think a 20X optical zoom. At the time, I didn't have access to good solar filters, so this photo was taken through the magnetic/plastic film of a 3.5in floppy disk.
A note of warning: It is unsafe to view the sun in that manner. You can cause serious retinal damage or your camera's sensor could be damaged.
I did have a pair of paper eclipse glasses obtained from Amazon, and used them for range-finding and casual viewing over the 2.5 hours of the transit. The long duration of the transit, along with good weather meant that this transit was very forgiving to anyone photographing it.
This is what got me looked on transits.
Next post:
All about the solar transits
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