The Second Half of Life: The Venus Transit of the Sun

Instead of there being a weather front coming in, as in the case of the annular eclipse, the Venus transit was plagued with a front moving out. If I had trusted the local weather forecasts, I might have stayed in my local area and imaged the transit. The satellite photos that morning (6/5/12) were promising. I took off at 6:10am and drove to Red Bluff, CA, where I had imaged the eclipse. The weather forecasts there were showing about 34% cloud-cover in the afternoon and evening and were a lot better than other areas within reasonable driving times.

I arrived in Red Bluff about 1:30pm and, after stopping to hydrate myself and stock up on “5-hour energy” for the drive back (later that day), went straight to the same old quiet place on the country road east of Red Bluff. The transit started around 3:10pm, appearing first as a “mouse-bite”, and I imaged it until it was fully within the area of the Sun. At that point, I changed to eye-piece projection, using a new adapter that makes it easy to perfectly position the camera behind the lens. Some experimenting at home had taught me that a 17mm eyepiece would work, giving me good magnification (~ 29x) while keeping the exposure time short enough for unguided imaging. Unlike during the eclipse, this time I utilized the hand-controller of the clock drive to keep the image centered (after first getting it centered with a lower power lens).

Focus was again the toughest part of this. I continued to simply “eyeball it” and to make many re-adjustments hoping that I’d get a few that were well focused. When the total eclipse rolls around in August 2017, I’ll want to be set up the night before, be polar-aligned and not have to be making any centering adjustments. Longer exposures will likely be required for totality. I’ll also want to have the focus well-adjusted and locked going into totality. With my SXVR-M25C camera I should be able to do computer downloads quickly enough that I can better zero-in on best focus… but I’ll need to experiment with it to confirm.

Here are a couple of my images from the Venus transit. More can be found on my Picasa site. For now, I think I’m done with the Sun in 2012 and ready to move back to deep space and some experimentation with imaging the planets using eye-piece projection and my new capability.