Venus Transit - 2004

On the 8th June 2004 the world had the opportunity to watch the transit of Venus across the Suns disk. As there had been over 122 years since the last transit I decided that it was more than worthy of taking the day off to watch and record. With my Meade LX200GPS 10 inch telescope and a couple of video cameras I was able to observe the Venus transit.

Here is a shot of the front lawn with the telescope connected to a computer, along with the other video cameras. The telescope was pointed directly at the Sun as I had a solar filter attached. The video cameras only had welding glasses of shade 12.

Ideally a laptop would have worked the best here rather than having a full on desktop PC parked on the front lawn. You can also see here the webcam attached to the PC looking directly through the telescope. No eye pieces were used.

Unfortunately the recording of the transit through the webcam didn't go to plan. I had difficulties knowing exactly where I was looking at the Suns disk, so I resorted to removing the webcam and replacing the eye piece so that I could view and film the transit visually. Here is a short clip of the transit recorded through the eye piece.