Venus Transit June 5, 2012
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An avid amateur astronomer since childhood, I was looking forward to the Venus Transit of June 5, 2012. Having spent quite a bit of time in astrophotography, so am a bit comfortable attaching cameras to telescopes.
I attached a Nikon D5100 to an Orion 80mm f7.5 telescope; the scope was on a manual alt-azm mount, and a piece of solar film was attached to the end of the scope which blocked 99.9% of the suns light.
The camera is attached to the telescope without a lens attached to the camera or an eyepiece in the telescope; the lens of the telescope is the lens for the camera. The camera is on full manual, and focus was achieved by using the live view on the camera (one great feature of the D5100 is the screen articulates.) I shot using a cable release and 3-4 shot bursts using continuous shooting mode. The cool thing about shooting with a DLSR that take HD movies, is that you can switch back and forth between taking movies and shooting stills; here is a short movie captured of the transit:
The big dot is Venus and the little dots are sunspots; at 3:10pm PDT Venus was just at the edge of the Sun; by 4:10pm the sun had moved well into the suns disk. Interesting stat; it would take 4 earths to fit across one of those sunspots!
Hope you had a chance to see this event; if not your out of luck as the next event is over 100 years away!
The setup:
This post for information purpose only and not for use as instruction for sun viewing.
NEVER look at the sun with unprotected eyes, or through a telescope or binoculars!
