A Day Off
Originally published June 6, 2012
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image by Morgan Wood
The Moon isn't in this image (it is in the sky far to the east), but once every hundred years or so LPOD will deviate from the norm and openly (rather than on April 1) publish pictures of things other than the Moon. And this is also a rare LPOD that includes me, or at least a body part. My son Morgan snapped the Venus transit photo with an iPhone during a rare break in the clouds just before sunset. We used a very low tech, traditional procedure - I held a white card in front of the eyepiece and focused by moving the card in and out. The telescope was an Orion 4.5" StarBlast mini dob. Even though I had seen the 2004 transit (at Harvard College Observatory with Jonathon McDowell) I was still surprised at how large Venus appeared compared to the peewee size of Mercury that I had seen twice before. It also seemed that Venus was not as sharply edged as Mercury, but memories of observations over a decade apart with different telescopes are not reliable. It is nice to make a historic observation from our deck with the I-70 bridge over the Ohio River in the background.
Chuck Wood
Technical Details
iPhone camera.
Yesterday's LPOD: An Eclipse To Come
Tomorrow's LPOD: Moon Unaffected by Transit
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