Daily Archives: 6/6/2012

Still from a video snap of the Venus Transit

I did try to take some video of the transit, but the higher magnification created by the rather small imager in the video camera, combined with too much AGC and a lot of wind buffeting didn’t make for very interesting imagery compared to the surprisingly excellent iphone snaps I had before. But just to give you an idea of what they look like, here are a couple of snaps…

Shot with my P23C video camera from Supercircuits...

Another, nearly identical image... same setup.

About all these are good for is judging the relative apparent size of the sun with Venus. But it was a fun outing.

iPhone photos of the Venus transit…

Yesterday, I setup my Meade ETX-90 outside with a solar filter in the courtyard between buildings at work so that my coworkers could have a glimpse of this rather rare astronomical event. I had a pretty steady stream of people coming out to have a peek throughout the day. I managed to shoot some video of it as an experiment, but again, wind buffeting and the like made focus difficult and the overall image was pretty bouncy.

But David Munier, one of my coworkers spent a few minutes clicking away by holding his iPhone at the eyepiece, and came away with these two awesome pictures! Very, very nice! I normally call this style of astrophotography “ghetto astrophotography”, but I think these are good enough to just call them astrophotographs.

Not bad, for an iPhone!

Even better! Great job, Dave!

The blue blobs are light flare from reflections near the eyepiece, but they look kind of cool!

I’ve got some more photos and stuff that I’ll try to get up shortly, but until then, enjoy!