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.