Unless you plan on living to be as old as The Professor, this is the last chance you will get to see the Transit of Venus. It starts in about 2 hours, so read fast!
The Transit of Venus is one of the rarest astronomical phenomenon. Pairs of transits, separated by 8 years, occur every 105.5 or 121.5 years. The pattern repeats every 243 years. So, the next chance you’ll have to see Venus cross the face of the sun is in December 2117.
The Transit of Venus will take several hours (the last one in 2004 lasted 6 hours) and will appear as a small black dot moving across the sun. What’s incredible about astronimical phenominon is you will be seeing the same thing that people hundreds of years ago witnessed. You can feel what Jeremiah Horrocks felt, when he watched the Transit of Venus in 1639 (the first known scientific observation) from his home in England. It’s incredibly humbling. You realize just how small we are. It also brings us together. Millions of people are seeing the same exact thing, and are excited about it.
Don’t stare at the sun! We only have like 5 readers, so if you go blind our internet ranking will drop by 20%! Instead, you can use special glasses or just watch it on the internet at the SLOOH SpaceCamera website.
[Image Credit: Jan Herold]
Or get #14 Welding goggles, however, I'm relying on the fact that I have much better than average eyesight to be able to see it. It's a nice sunny day here in the Bay Area. I'm going to head up to the Oakland/Berkeley hills to see it. There are some good vista points on Grizzly Peak Blvd and Sibley has some good west facing areas in the north end of the park.
Grizzly Peak Blvd was a good call. I found some astronomers with telescopes up there. I couldn't get a good shot through the eyepiece, but we rigged the view finder as an impromptu projector, and I snapped this:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/Xrfgj.jpg">
EDIT: I was also able to see the shadow of Venus through my trusty #14 welding glass, but the telescopes were way better.
EDIT #2: Didn't go blind. Your Google Analytics scores won't suffer due to ocular injury on my part. Oh wait, I've got GA's javascript blocked… (and you don't appear to use it… Oh well. I stand by my dumb joke.)
And it's cloudy, and it was cloudy during the eclipse. Damnit!
What a screwjob, especially living in a place where it really does not rain that often!
Yeah, it's cloudy here too. The best place to be an astronomer is to live in bloody High Earth Orbit, then you just need to worry about dodging the occasional asteroid or solar flare.
Whoa, now why would you be dodging that solar flare?
<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/FF509.jpg/250px-FF509.jpg">
Good lord, could you imagine trying to get along with Reed Richards?
[youtube mtmndVpJrW8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtmndVpJrW8 youtube]
"We only have like 5 readers…."
You're not counting me, right? I don't read anything here. I just hope for the best with random comments.
So far, so good, I assume.
And I count as two.
/No you don't, I do!
I'm just here for the pictures myself. And the pithy comments…which I don't read. I just look at them and assume they're pithy, even the Professor's.
I don't usually point out things like this, but the correct spelling is "pissy."
I heard that, rock hound!
Pithy:
1. brief, forceful, and meaningful in expression; full of vigor, substance, or meaning; terse; forcible: a pithy observation.
2. of, like, or abounding in pith.
Pissy:
1. soiled with or reeking of urine.
2. inferior, nasty, or disagreeable.
Yes, I can see how one might confuse the two words, especially where the Professor (or a lisp) is concerned, but I occasionally try to give him the benefit of the doubt.
It turns out that the sun isnt quite bright enough to trip the lens on an auto darkening welding helmet.
Blergh.
Fortunately, the friendly university astronomers had a couple of nice telescopes and some camera obscura setups.
If the sun triggered the helmet, it wouldn't un-darken on a sunny day.
Your auto-darkening helmet probably maxes out around shade #12 or 13. Even if you could get it to activate, you need at least a #14 for solar use.
Our university's observatory had some solar film to look through. I tried it, and though I could see the sun, without magnification I couldn't see Venus. I did get to see it through some filtered binoculars, a telescope, and a closed-circuit feed.
I was just able to see it through my welding glass, some of the time. It was small, back lit and there was a decent bit of hazy atmosphere in the way. I'm glad I ran into some folks with telescopes though. It was much easier to see with real equipment.
A few weeks ago when the eclipse went down, I was at the bar next door and reminded everybody that this celestial event was happening. I asked for and got a twelve pack cardboard case and punched a hole in it, to show the eclipse safely on a car hood. The bar owner remembered he had a broken welding helmet in the shed, and we all observed the eclipse that way, out on the street. Pretty cool. Today, for the Transit of Venus, I was out on the street smoking a cigarette, and somebody came up with a sun safe viewing thing, and we saw it that way. Hey, hang out in a bar in Tombstone, and you'll see some pretty cool things.