The Venus Transit
event put on by the wonderful people of the Adirondack Public Observatory went off with a bang! It really turned out to be a great
day, and there were so many people that showed up for the event. I'd
like to thank the people of the APO for putting on the event, and all
the people that showed up to the event. You helped make it a fun and
enjoyable time.
The skies weren't
exactly clear, even up to 5pm – an hour before the transit started.
But we setup on the beach anyway, and at the Wild Center. We were
prepared for it to clear, and we were prepared with indoor events in
case the clouds didn't clear. Luckily we were blessed with clear
skies from a few minutes before the transit started, right up until
the sun set. After sunset the clouds slowly rolled in, and I drove
through three heavy downpours on the way from Tupper Lake back to
Plattsburgh.
For all images, click to enlarge.
As we were setting
up on Little Wolf Beach people started coming in, much quicker than I
had expected. There was quite the turnout on the beach, with many
people interested in the event asking questions. Unfortunately by the
time I got to Saranac Lake I wanted to get a picture on the side of
the road, but then realized my point and shoot camera battery was
still on the charger at home. Good thing I had my cell phone to grab
a few pictures of people at the event.
At times I had
quite a line building up around my telescope, people of all ages from
children to seniors all seemed to be impressed with what they were
seeing. Lots of “ooohs” and “aaaahs” from everyone. I'm just
happy that I was a part of it. This was my first time involved in an
event like this, and I have to say I loved every second of it. I also got my first look through a Personal Solar Telescope which was very cool to see some solar prominence as Venus was trekking along the face of the sun. There was also a table top dobsonian, a 10" dobsonian, and an 8" dobsonian telescope on the beach.
I don't know what
I did in order to miscount how many images I took for each stack, but
I ended up with way more than 30 images per stack like I had planned.
Glad I got more images than I had planned, it really helped sharpen
up the images when stacking and editing them to really bring out
Venus, and the sunspots that were visible.
The first image is
comprised of 53 images, the second is 61, and the third is also 61.
All pictures were taken at ISO200, and a shutter speed of 1/4000
prime focus with a white light filter. As the sun got closer to the
horizon you can see that even through the white light filter the sun
became a pretty orange color. Images stacked in Registax, and cropped
in Gimp.
Here is a time
lapse of the sun setting behind some mountains with Venus still in
transit. Short 7 second video, best viewed full screen in HD.
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