Venus Transit 2004 .. I found another picture.

Goodbye Venus ..See you in 2012

Yesterday I was looking through one of my old astronomy log books, and I found the above picture.

I've always thought I had just the one picture of the 2004 Venus Transit....It looks like I was wrong...  :0)


Time to attack it with Macintosh software........

After a bit of photo manipulation using iPhoto...
I managed to obtain the following image...

Hidden in a drawer, I have some video footage of the 2004 transit. In total I think I have the last 15 minutes of the transit.  

If I convert this footage from analogue to digital I will be able to exam more closely the individual frames..

It seems yesterday morning I had one photo of the 2004 transit....  this morning I now thankfully have two....  If the video footage can be transferred to the computer ...

I'll hopefully have a lot more images of the event to look through....

Fingers crossed that the video footage is salvageable....  :0)

Waiting for the evening star....

Tal1 patiently waiting to snag the evening star

The back garden doesn't get used that often for astronomical observing, it's a pity as it affords some lovely views of the setting inferior planets .

Tonight though it was time for the Tal1 to be let loose on Venus. 

I simply parked up the scope and waited for the night to draw in...

About an hour later the sky was still blue, but Venus shone brightly......
......time to put the Tal into  action....

Firstly I took this image with just the 25mm plossl and the zoom on my digicam:

Afocal image.. with simple digicam

Then I connected our Nikon D50 via a camera adapter to the Tal's focuser using the prime focus method...

It took a few attempts to capture a decent image, but finally I managed the following image.

Nikon D50 prime focus plus x3 Barlow

Not the best shot in the world, but at least it gave me a record of the current Venusian phase...

It was a beautiful evening, the seeing was Antoniadi II but I would guess sometimes the clarity hinted at maybe an Antonadi of I........  the best seeing for many months I reckon....