Transit of Venus 2012

It wasn't easy getting up this morning at 0430 AM to go watch the sunrise and the last 80 minutes of the transit of Venus over the Sun, I swear. But it was worth it. I arrived at the Zagreb Astronomical Observatory at about 0520, and was pleasantly surprised to see almost 20 people already watching, amongst whom a nice number of my former astronomy professors. The first photo was thus taken at 0521, about 80 minutes before Venus completely crossed the solar disk.

Though pretty, sunrise is NOT a great time to observe the Sun.

The wavy border is caused by the atmosphere, kids.

Then we did a little talking and walking to-and-fro - from one side of the roof to the other, and then I took some more photos.

High-tech equipment and low-tech methods = awesome.

A lot of sunspots, too.

And, though I honestly completely forgot to take the photos of that, there actually were other things beside the projection from that big bad-ass telescope. There was a smaller telescope with a filter on, to watch directly through the eyepiece, two cool camera obscura thingies which were very interesting, a live stream from some other observatory, albeit which one is another thing I forgot to take notice of (cut me some slack, it was terribly early)... All in all, a very pleasant morning, both from the scientific and the social point of view.

Now I just have to wait some 105 years for the next transit...

This is where the fun was.