Venus Transit

From our backyard with our homemade viewer we were able to capture the silhouette of Venus during its transit across the sun.

Then we attended a free Transit of Venus event at Loews Ventana Canyon Resort where various activities and telescopes were set up

and cultural astronomer Richard Poss gave an interesting lecture.

I thought this little wooden "Sunspotter" telescope was really neat.  It uses a system of three mirrors and two lenses inside a triangle that can rotate on the semicircular base.

     

The image projected onto white paper was clear and easy to view.

These are reflections of the event on windows and a screen which had live video feed from NASA:

Back home again, we took a picture through a filter:

The next transit of Venus will be in 2117.

See more sky posts from around the world at Skywatch Friday.

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