Transit of Venus Redux: More Great Images

[/caption]

Images and video from the Transit of Venus on June 5/6, 2012 are still pouring in, and we needed to share just a few more. Here’s an awesome close-up look at the event in Hydrogen Alpha from accomplished astrophotographer John Chumack. He used a Lunt Solar Scope 60mm/50F H-Alpha filter and a DMK 21AF04 Fire-wire camera. This is 741 frames & 1/91 second exposure. John has more images on our Flickr page, and on his website, Galactic Images.

Venus transit with a transit of B747 jumbo across the solar disk which was captured by one of the members of the Tamilnadu Astronomical Society in India, Mr. Muralikrishna Kanagala during our transit event at Elliots Beach, Madras, India at 6.02 hrs IST, as the Sun rose. He used a Baader filtered Sony DSH H50 Camera.

Patrick Cullis put together this amazing time-lapse of the Transit, which features two telescopes, an airplane transit, sunset, and a few different angles of the view.

The above video is from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, a composite of the entire Transit, set to music.

And finally, this image and story from Blake Crosby and his son Orion from Charleston, South Carolina, displaying the lengths people would go to witness this event:

“This won’t be the best shot of the transit by a long shot, but my son and I jumped through a lot of hoops just to get it,” Crosby wrote in an email. “We live in Charleston, SC and our horizon is blocked by towering pine trees so we checked into the 9th floor of a Holiday Inn with a westward facing room. After lugging up all of our equipment, we found out that the doors to the balconies had been permanently closed, so we would have to shoot through a pane of glass with our Canon Rebel XS attached to a Celestron Nexstar 4SE with a Seymour filter. Furthermore, we were greeted, like many others, with a thick wall of clouds that just didn’t want to budge. Even worse, the hotel’s wifi was so shoddy we couldn’t stream any of the live views from the internet. However, we got a lucky break at about 8:00 EDT when the clouds parted for about 2 minutes and we were able to snap a couple of pics. My son Orion remarked that he was glad we endured those setbacks just so we could get a glimpse of an event that won’t happen again in our lifetimes.”

You can always see more images of many great astronomical views on our Flickr group page. Join us in sharing your images there and we may post them on Universe Today!