I came as close to watching the transit of Venus as I
ever will to watching anything last night. The first Tuesday of
every month is the meeting date of the Stillwater Amateur Radio
Club and we meet at the Salvation Army Church building here in
town. The fellow I ride to work with is a big astronomy and
space fan as he is retired from NASA and used to work in NASA's
office on the OSU campus.
He brought a 4-inch, roughly 10 centimeter, reflecting
telescope and we found a good patch of late afternoon Sun near
the building. It was around 19:15-19:30 or 7:15-7:30 P.M. so the
Sun is about an hour-and-a-half from setting this time of year,
here.
The biggest problem one encounters is that of tall
objects on the ground casting shadows and we had a number of
trees to contend with.
Instead of an eye-piece, the telescope was fitted with a
lens that projected the image to a small screen he had for this
purpose.
After aiming the telescope, the Sun was a disk of about
8 CM across. We have several Sun Spots which are much smaller
than a millimeter and this mostly solid black dot near one edge of the disk
which was about a millimeter in diameter. That was Venus or more
correctly, the shadow of Venus. The dot had first hit the edge
of the Sun's disk around 2 hours earlier and would slowly creep
across the disk for around 8 hours.
People on the West Coast of North America and far North
in Alaska would get to see several hours more of the transit
than we did. Those of you in Europe and the UK, unfortunately,
missed all of it or maybe got the very tail end as the Sun came
up.
We all stood around and watched the image. As somebody
said, you don't see the dot move but if you look away and then
back, it has moved ever so little. There is also the need to
move the telescope as the Earth turns so that complicates the
observation, slightly.
All in all, it was an interesting evening.
Martin
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