It was big enough for us to see unaided. It was a small black dot, but a black dot on the Sun is unusual enough and the contrast was fine.
I helped about a dozen people see it with no magnification, using eclipse glasses for protection. Some of them needed a few tries, but everyone saw it.
The skies have betrayed me! I researched carefully and constructed a solar filter for my telescope. I tested it yesterday (didn’t go blind, so I guess I did it right.) I thought I was all set. I got the kids up early (we’re a bit north of Minneapolis; it was only visible until about 6:25am, an hour after sunrise) and got to our good seeing spot. Clouds. Grrr.
We hung around for 15 minutes or so, hoping for a break, but no luck. We went back to the house and watched the end of it live on the NASA channel, but it’s just not the same.
An hour later on my way to work the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, just to spite me.
Here in Arizona we are in exactly the wrong side to see anything at all. I prowled around the net but didn’t find anything suitable for a dialup like I got at home, so I fired up a planetarium program I have installed and watched it vicariously for about a half hour. Just not like the Real Thing, somehow. When I went to check Google on which side the 2016 transit will be, their graphic was honoring it. Cool.
DD
As Colophon has already said, conditions in the UK were near perfect. In London this morning there was just a thin haze that wasn’t interfering with the transit at all. (It’s actually been the sunniest and warmest day of the year so far.) I broke out my old 60mm refractor for the first time in years. Despite it being a long, long time since I’ve used it to project the Sun, it was pretty easy to get a good image.
Annoyingly, the timing from here was such that to see it crossing the edges of the solar disk either required getting up very early or watching in the middle of the working day, so I didn’t see any of the contacts. Would have been interesting to have seen how my timing accuracy stacked up against the 18th century observations - and see the “black drop” effect - but it wasn’t to be.