Can get a preetty good view with handheld binocs prjecting on paper. I think I set this so you don’t need facebook to see.
Brian
We are watching it at work right now. So Cal. Guy brought in a handheld welder’s glass, and we have a 6th floor west facing window and it’s very clear. We discovered that you need dark sunglasses with the welder’s glass to properly see it.
I built a pinhole projector in all of 5 minutes out of a ~7 foot cardboard tube, and Venus is visible in the projection. Very faintly, but it’s unmistakable.
A few shots of my #venustransit viewing event today. I used an old refractor telescope and projected the image onto a piece of white foam board. I took about 100 shots but culled them down to just a few.
Well, here we sit in Seattle with a beautiful view of a heavy cloud layer. There’s a really good reason they built the 200" Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain in California rather than on the University of Washington campus.
I brought a pair of binoculars to work and we’ve just successfully managed to see the transition on a piece of paper. Really brings home how huge the sun it - Venus looks tiny.
Intermittent cloud cover here, but enough clear skies to allow some “viewing.”
I went and got some of the Eclipse Glasses from the museum that they had leftover from last month’s elcipse. Only $2 a pair. Now that I think about it, I wish I had grabbed more then two. I kept them figuring it’ll be nice to have them around for future solar events.
Anyways, I’m glad I watched it, I’m glad I made my 6 year old daughter go out and take a couple looks at it, but all in all it wasn’t all that exciting. I kept watching for it and watching for it and all of a sudden I realized it had already started. It was soooo tiny I hardly noticed it. I tried to get pictures of it, but they didn’t turn out very well. I had a 300mm lens on my camera with a UV and IR filter but the spot was so tiny it couldn’t pick it up. Next time there’s something going on I’ll have to get some advice from my dSLR board and take some practice shots the day or week before so I can be ready. Maybe even pick up the a different filter. I’m not sure if those were the right filters, but I thought about it at the last minute and slapped them on. The IR filter was nice though since it allowed me to look through the viewfinder without the glasses (not sure if it was safe, but it didn’t hurt for the few seconds it took to aim and focus).
Also, these are the glasses that I got. My museum had them for $2. Next time there’s a solar eclipse that’s probably a good place to get them cheap. I’d guess most (science) museums have them in their gift shops. They worked really well. I was surprised that I could look directly at the sun and see it very clearly as just a dim spot with no glare at all around it. Not only that, it didn’t strain my eyes either. It basically looked exactly like this.
Then I spent 5 minutes explaining to my sisters that no, even when there’s no ToV or eclipse going on that you would still want to use the glasses if you felt the need to stare at the sun. They weren’t sure if it was brighter for some reason today and that’s why we needed them. (not a terrible question) I tried to explain to them that we need them during the ToV because we’re going to stare at the sun and we need them during the eclipse because it appears dimmer but will still due damage. I’m pretty sure they just heard ‘blah blah blah’ and then stopped listening. Sometimes I’m not even sure why they ask me questions. I swear they just hoping for a yes or no answer, but dammit I like explaining things.
Just wondering - if I sputtered gold on a piece of glass, would that work as a filter? How about just for a camera filter?
I wouldn’t use anything improvised to look at the Sun through. The eye damage that results can be permanent, and there’s nothing anybody can do to fix it. Is that really a chance you want to take?
Also, you can’t test any improvised solution for how well it blocks non-visible light, unless you’ve got equipment at home that most of us don’t have. It’s not just the visible light that does the damage, it’s also the IR and UV.
I might take the chance with a camera. But, if you’re going to photograph the Sun, remember that, while the viewfinder of a camera may have provided some protection against the glare of a basilisk in the Harry Potter books, it doesn’t provide any meaningful eye protection against the light of the Sun.
You’re assuming that anyone uses viewfinders any more?
In principle, you could make a fine filter by sputtering gold onto glass. In practice, there’s a fine line between “so little gold that it’s still dangerous” and “so much gold that you can’t see the Sun any more”. You’d be hard-pressed to get it just right.
Oh thanks. I was wondering if the gold would be particles or a film.
I thought of another thing regarding the transit: does it occur at the same time to everyone on Earth? I don’t mean timezones, I mean does the parallax of your position on Earth affect the apparent positions of Venus and the Sun? Or are the distances too great?
I can’t find a reference at the moment, but from memory (which may be faulty) I think there was a difference of something like 20-30 minutes depending on one’s location.
The parallax of Venus with respect to the Sun was precisely why scientists were interested in the transit of Venus back in the 18th century: if you measure the parallax, you can figure out how far away Venus is relative to some known baseline on the Earth. This was the first concerted attempt to figure out the size of astronomical unit, and was “big science” for its time. So 18th century scientists must have thought they could measure it with their instruments (though due to atmospheric effects, it turned out not to be as precisely measurable as they had hoped.)