When looking at the sun's projection in my 'sun-box', I was amazed by the largness of Venus. Venus surely would be considered a giant sunspot if it fact had been one. But according to my calculations the inky and perfectly round spot that was Venus would not have been bigger than about 400 millionths of the sun's hemisphere if it were a spot on the center of the sun's disk. A spot of that size is barely visible whith the naked eye. But Venus was an easy naked-eye object. Why? Probably because the planet was much blacker and also much bigger than any sunspot umbra.

Takahashi Mewlon 210 Dall-Kirkham, Thousand Oaks glass solar filter. Afocal with a William Optics 24 mm eyepiece and a Nikon Coolpix 995 digital camera. Light scudding cloud and haze at many levels.

After getting up at 4:30am and setting up at Culloden Moor by 5:30am the Highlands Astronomical Society members had to wait until just after 11:00am to record our first sightings. We even had to endure a very heavy period of rain about 10:30am. Typical Scotland, but it was worth it though! The images are back-to-front as they were viewed through a 114mm reflector with a 32mm Plossl + 2x Barlow. Images were taken (afocal) using a Nikon Coolpix 5700 and cleaned up with Adobe Photoshop.

Here in Quebec, we only got the end of the transit, but it was pretty spectacular to see the sun rising with Venus' silhouette in front of it.

Wildlife and haze surround the transit of venus at sunrise over the Kawarthas. The clouds and Venus make the sun look like Jupiter.

Details: Takahashi FS102 @ f/8 Fujicolor Superia 200 film.

These were taken with a Kodak DX 4600 (4 meg) camera hand held into the Pentax eyepieces on an 8 inch old Coulter Dob. Real viewing was so neat! So obviously 3 dimensional - Venus stuck out so far in front of the Sun - amazing effect considering the use of just one eye!

Images were captured with a 20-cm Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with a f/6.3 focal reducer and a Philips ToUcam Pro 740K webcam between 11:05 and 11:10 UT. Each frame is a composite of 100 raw images captured at 5 frames per second for 20 seconds, composited and processed with Registax 2.1.

From 6:10 until 6:55 I used a Nikon CP 4500 and a pair of cellophane eclipse sunglasses in front of the CP lens to catch the Venus transit. A very low-tech photo.

more: from Marcelo Kaczmarech of Ponta Grossa, Parana, Brazil; from Dave Gulyas at the Lorain International Marina, Lorain, Ohio, USA; from Frank Lach of New York, New York, USA; from Kevin Walsh of Fanwood, NJ, USA (projected from a 6' Newtonian telescope); from Linda Smith at the Thomas G. Cupillari Observatory in Fleetville, PA, USA; from Joe Webster of Annapolis, MD, USA; from Patrick Chevalley of Geneva, Switzerland; from Anthony Liu of Hong Kong; from Tiganus Marian of Braila, Romania (projected from 20x50 binoculars to a case of a computer);