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comment by am_Unition
am_Unition  ·  3534 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I chased the solar eclipse, got these pics

I love astronomical events like eclipses and transits.

Here's some shots of the transit of Venus I got from 2012 (complete with sunspots):

I enjoy imagining our place in a galactic community within which we have unique sets of events that are a part of "Earth culture". Perhaps in the future, alien races will bolster "Earth tourism"? Probably not... space-time has a LOT of space, and not enough time (at least for the experience of a single human).

Obligatory





mike  ·  3527 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Are those shots happening live? What is your set-up, looks really really interesting!

I tried to watch the transit of Venus in 2012. It remember it was very early in the morning in Norway, maybe 5 or 6 am. We had clouds. My daughter and I came home and watched a live feed from an observatory instead.

am_Unition  ·  3527 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oh yeah, those were taken on my iPhone over the course of about 30 minutes to an hour between the two shots. We had excellent timing for the event (~1700 local time), and only a few little cumulus clouds to contend with.

We had a tripod-mounted Cassegrain-Schmidt (I think) telescope projecting the solar disk up through the eyepiece onto a slab of white poster board. There was a nice little crowd of people in the parking lot where we were doing this, right outside of a couple of office buildings we all work in. Also, a tinted filter on the 'scope so as not to melt the optics.

I got lucky on that one, but I've had to chase a lunar eclipse up into the hills west of town. We punched through the low cloud deck just before totality. No pics on that one because cameraphone + moon photography of any kind = bad results.