Venus Transit Bookends

There are hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of Venus Transit photos blanketing the web right now.  Many of them look almost exactly the same, showing the Sun with the black disk of Venus amid a pattern of sunspots that will be long-remembered.  (See the previous blog posting for my contribution to this same-ness.)  But when clouds and foreground are added, suddenly everyone's photo is different.  The photo above is one of my contributions to this variety -- as the Sun dipped lower in the sky, there were some clouds to add interesting pixels to the image.

From San Francisco, the Transit started at 3:06 pm and continued until the Sun dipped below the horizon at 8:44 pm with the transit still in progress.  The next two photos represent the bookends of my experience -- the Venusian ingress on the front end and a picturesque sunset on the back end.





You may have noticed that in the last photo above, the image of Venus has been elongated vertically.  Of course, this is due to the distortion of the Sun's setting image as its light rays slog through layer upon layer of atmosphere at the tail end of its 93 million mile journey to my camera lens.

Throughout the transit, there were also various non-Venus scenes that presented themselves near my San Francisco Cliff House location.  To see all 9 images, see my associated Flickr set (slideshow).

All in all, June 5, 2012 was a very memorable day!  :-)

Dark Venus

Tuesday I was in San Francisco gazing at the Sun through solar-filtered binoculars -- then it happened. The planet Venus crossed in front of our star.

For almost seven hours, the brightest planet in the sky went dark -- a jet-black disk against the bright Sun. This was the last time it will do so until December of 2117. No one alive today will get to view the next Venus Transit.

Altogether, I shot about 450 pictures of the event; my first -- and last -- attempt at Venus Transit photography. In the coming days and/or weeks, I'll share some more of the photos. But for now, the image that is burned in my mind is the one above: Dark Venus gliding in front of the Bright Star.