Transit of Venus Page

Transit of Venus viewed from Shotover

Whilst not perhaps as spectacular as comet Hale-Bopp, an event as rare as the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun could hardly be allowed to pass un-noticed by "Shotover Observatory". With more than a century to wait for the next chance to view one from Shotover, it was a now-or-never opportunity.

The transit took place on 8th June 2004 and the image shown here was photographed at 06:46 UT. (Note that this is an inverted image.)

The apparatus, shown on the left, was minimal. An inverted image of the sun was projected onto a white card, using 10x 25mm monocular. A cardboard shield (not shown) prevented direct sunlight reaching the card. The image was photographed using a Fuji Finepix 1300 digital camera, used in macro mode such that the image of the sun filled most of the frame. (The image shown here has been cropped and reduced in resolution to provide a small file size for this web page.)

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Last Updated 2004-06-08