Transit of Venus 2012

The alarm clock was set to 03:10 this morning, so I could catch the Transit of Venus. When I went to bed last night, the sky was clear, and it looked promising.

There were a lot of people already there when I arrived, and telescopes and cameras were set up.

However, the sky looked like this:

Not very promising.

However, at around 4:30, there was a breakthrough in the clouds, and I got this image:

As this only lasted for a very short time, people gathered around my camera, to look at the photo, and some of them took a photo of the camera screen with their iPhone 🙂

Around 6, a lot of people gave up and left, and missed the best part of the show. At 6:20 the sky opened again and lasted to the end of the transit, with only some scattered clouds. Some lucky people arrived just a few minutes before, and everybody got to see the transit in the telescopes.

Below are some more photos.

And here is one of my last photos, as Venus is leaving the transit.

All photos are taken with Sony Alpha 580, using 70-200F2.8 lens, with solar filter.

And here is a photo of me taken by Wenche Aune.

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Our neighbors in the sky

Last Saturday we had a really clear sky for a change, and I got some photos of our celestial neighbors. I used my 11-18mm lens, and took two different pictures, and then stitched them together. The stitch itself is very visible, especially due to the wide angle lens, but the moon is placed overlapping in the two photos. So from left to right: Mars (far down to the left), Moon, Jupiter and Venus. Due to the forest I never got to see Mercury, and before Saturn decided to come above the horizon, the clouds came.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Both photos are taken at 11mm, 400 ISO, F8, 2.5seconds.