Venus Transit

If you weren't already aware of it, today there was a Venus Transit, an event that occurs only twice every (approximately) 120 years. The last Venus Transit was in 1882, the next will be in 2012, and then there won't be another until 2117.

Being amateur astronomers, (OK, A. is the amateur astronomer, I just tag along and look into the telescope) A. and I lugged our telescope outside at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. (I am not a morning person!) to check it out. When we were discussing it last night, I suggested we try and take some pictures of it with my digital camera. It took some shots to get the hang of it, but some of them came out quite nicely.

If you look at the below pictures, Venus is the black dot in the Sun. Our telescope shows things upside down, so we saw Venus at the top of the Sun, but technically it was at the bottom.

photo by blondelibrarian

Pretty cool, huh?