Tuesday, June 5, 2012

2012 Venus Transit

Here are some photos of the 2012 Venus Transit. What is depicted here is the passing of the planet Venus between the Earth and the Sun. In order to view the transit safely, I had to be creative. I looked online and found a safe and easy way to display an image of the sun on a piece of paper. Here is what I did: I took a pair of binoculars and attached them to a tripod, then I aimed the binoculars at the sun (not by looking through them, of course), then I held a piece of paper behind the binoculars. The big round light spot on the paper is the sun; the little black dot on the bottom right side of the sun is Venus. The first picture was taken early during the transit, so editing didn't alter the color. The subsequent pictures were taken later when the sun was lower, so the image is more of a reddish orange. Just to clarify, my editing consisted of lowering the brightness and raising the contrast of the pictures. I did not alter the pictures in any other ways.