Transit of Venus.

[Sanddancer]

Well, I for one am excited about seeing this one. The first of the pair for me (June 8th 2004) was a tad too early in the morning for my liking and I only managed to catch the last few minutes.

[Sir Lunch-a-lot]

Well, I tried to watch the transit today using a (approx.) 4 foot long pinhole camera I made at work (couldn't find/afford Shade #14 welding goggles, nor was I clever enough to order solar eclipse glasses on the internet ahead of time). I was able to see an image of the sun, but I couldn't see the black dot of Venus crossing it. That being said, there was near constant cloud cover - even though it thinned out enough to see the sun in my pinhole camera type device periodically... but I wonder if that thin layer of cloud was enough to obscure Venus. Too bad too... I've been looking forward to this since December... Oh well. I'll have to try my device on a clear day and see if I can see any sun-spots with it or something. I suppose I can give this another shot with the Mercury Transit in 2016 and hope for better weather then.

Anyone else have better luck observing the transit?

[Primis]

The entire time the sun was up here in New York we had massive cloud cover. Lucily however NASA EDGE was live streaming the event, for 6 hours, from Hawaii.
They had 3 telescopes (Calcium-K, White light, and Hydrogen) hooked up to RED 4k cameras. Pretty nice, considering I didn't have to drive for miles to find clear skies.
Since no one has mentioned it, [url]sunearthday.gsfc.nasa.gov/transitofvenus/[/url]

[yurell]

There were 300 people right outside my accommodation with a telescope & sun filter ... so glad I'm in the 'entire transit visible' band.

[Umjahwa]

Got to see a good portion of the transit here at my University. They had a nice video feed from a large telescope on roof as well as a couple smaller telescopes with solar filters. There were a few clouds but they surprisingly did not hamper viewing too much.

For those of you who might have missed the live NASA webcast, there are a number of really nice videos available on the SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory) website:
<sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/> (currently it redirects to <http://venustransit.gsfc.nasa.gov/>)

One of my favorite pictures from the event actually was taken by SDO right before ingress when you could see Venus with the solar corona behind it.
<pic.twitter.com/yrUtGYQK>

Enjoy!

[Qaanol]

It was raining here in Maine for the last three days. It even rained as I drove to the trailhead to hike a mountain. It stopped raining, and there was even some blue sky when I reached the summit. For a while there was direct sunlight as I waited for the transit. Then the clouds moved back in, and I had to wait out a rain shower.

Then more clouds, including a second rain shower that missed me but continued to block the sun. Then more clouds. Finally around 19:15, over an hour after the transit had begun, and more than two hours after I got to the mountaintop, the sun burst through. Half an hour later it was covered by clouds and gone for the night.

I got a few halfway decent pictures of the transit in the short time I had:

Spoiler:

My elite scientific equipment


First glimpse of Venus, with the sun still partly covered by clouds


Clear view of the sun


A close-up


Another close-up

Meanwhile the weather:

Spoiler:

Clouds for hours


Passing showers


A gap for the sun


But soon it was done

[PM 2Ring]

The weather here has been rather cloudy in recent days, but there were enough breaks in the cloud cover today to permit a decent viewing of the transit. A local surveyor with an interest in astronomy had made SolarScopes available to several local schools so that their students could view this transit, and he also set one up in a prominent public place so that any interested members of the public could view it. I spent a pleasant hour around noon watching the transit and chatting about astronomical topics with him and several passers-by.

[Tass]

I first looked at this chart and thought: "oh cool, my friends at Iceland gets to see the whole duration, Iceland is in the white area.", then I realized something was wrong. It would be happening at midnight on Iceland, and Iceland is not quite far enough north to get midnight sun. Of course Iceland is in the small area where the transit is in progress both at sunset and at the following sunrise.

Anyway no luck here (Denmark). Transit at progress damned early in the morning at sunrise, but completely cloudy.

[EdgarJPublius]

There was a humongous turnout for the viewing at the local university.

They had several telescopes set up with different solar filters on on the roof of a 17 story dorm building. When I got there (abour an hour after the transit started) the line was in the stairwell and down four floors. Luckily there was a lower roof that someone had set up a pin-hole projector at that no one was waiting in line for, so I watched that for a while and eventually somebody set up another projection using a pair of binoculars that was pretty cool, and a little later someone else set up a projection from a six-inch telescope that was pretty impressive.

By the time I left (about half an hour before sunset) the line for the roof was all the way down to the fourth floor.

[starslayer]

I helped out at the public event at Ohio State; we got almost completely clouded out. But about an hour before sunset, there was maybe a 10 minute sucker hole that opened up and we rushed to get as many people as possible a look through the telescopes. Then, right as the sun was setting, it poked out from below a cloud deck, and we were able to project it and see the transit on the setting sun; a couple people managed to get some really neat pictures.

[Xanthir]

A bunch of my coworkers at Google brought their telescopes for the day and set up around 3pm to watch it start. It was very cool! Also awesome to see the sunspots on the sun, since we had sufficiently decent equipment.

And of course, being a spring day in the Bay Area, it was fucking beautiful and cloudless the whole time.

[The EGE]

Southeastern CT here. I managed to get quite literally 5 seconds of viewing about 10 minutes before sunset through a distant hole. Hole opened, looked through binoculars (I'd made filters with optically-rated solar film), handed them to girlfriend, she looked, and the hole closed.

[Soralin]

Mmm... this thread needs some higher power telescopes:

Spoiler:

[eternauta3k]

<awesome pics>

Whaaaaaaat

No transit visible in South America. Balls to that.

[Soralin]

<awesome pics>

Whaaaaaaat

From here: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/ ... mages.html First one was from Hinode, the other two from SDO, both space telescopes.

[Jorpho]

One Jay Pasachoff likened it to a "pea entering a watermellon", which is about right. I had enough time to view it at a local event that provided free "eclipse glasses", though the sun eventually went behind some dense cloud cover.

Oddly, some time after I left said event, the sun was low enough to be visible again, but having departed the site I oddly could not seem to locate Venus again through my eclipse glasses. I know the transit was supposed to continue well after sunset here; was it supposed to get less visible closer to sunset?