Rustbucket Astrophotography

[acmespaceship]

Here is my Transit of Venus photo:


And here is my high-tech gear in action:





One pad of white paper
One pair of Galileo 8x21 folding binoculars, handheld
One Panasonic Lumix point & shoot, handheld (not shown but its presence may be inferred)
One Weber Smokey Joe to prop up the pad of paper
One small mirror, a sheet of paper with a hole in it, and some mylar (not shown), none of which proved useful

And yes, I pulled the closeup into GIMP to crop the image, remove color aberration and increase contrast.  I have a real camera and also serious optics but no solar filters, so I wasn't motivated to point them at the sun.

In the shot above, a telephone wire is crossing the top of the sun while Venus crosses the bottom. The Transit of Telephone Wire is the more common phenomenon but has never, as far as I know, been photographed from this location.

There. Now I feel like I've earned my "General Technics" name badge ribbon from DucKon. And I didn't need any liquid nitrogen either (that will be a separate project and there will be ice cream).

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Not the finest photo of the transit, but I'm very pleased that you were able to piece together a system to observe it firsthand and record that you did.

[e-m-b.livejournal.com]

How many husbands can arrive home from work to be shown the shadow of Venus on the sun by their wives? Well, this one can, and did. And she also made a dynamite cherry pie from fruit I picked in our backyard, baked in the Peri Charlifu pie plate we bought at the DucKon art auction.

Things like these allow us to keep living in Oak Park.