Pictures of the Transit are arriving from members of the BAA. Although the weather was generally poor a surprising number of members managed some sort of view of the event.
If you saw the Transit, please send your observations to the Venus section (venus@britastro.org) and to our Picture Editor (picture@britastro.org) for our Transit Gallery.
Here are a couple of pictures from Peter Edwards and Maurice Gavin.
Peter Edwards - June 6 2012, 0438 UT
Peter writes:
I got up at 4.30am BST, the sky was promising but there was clouds low down in the NE where the sun was rising. Still I stayed out, took a few photos of horses in the next field to me and a few cloud pics, then suddenly at around 05.35 BST the Sun broke through for a couple of minutes between the clouds and I managed to capture the attached image. I did manage to get two images, but this was the best one. The clouds actually add a bit of atmosphere (no pun etc). The image was taken with a Canon SX210 compact camera at max x14 zoom on a tripod, I think the exposure was 1/1250 sec at f/ 5.9 so I am doubly pleased to have got such a sharp image. I enlarged, cropped and tweaked in Photoshop.
Maurice Gavin - June 6 2012 04 49 UT
You can also watch Maurice’s video on YouTube: Maurice Gavin
@britastro
We don’t have many cloudy days in Perth, Western Australia, but Transit day was one of them.
This year, as in 2004, we, that is St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls Astronomical Society, in Mosman Park, near Perth, had planned to track the transit of Venus using our Edmund Scientific Astroscan telescope projecting the solar image to a whiteboard. Locally, the transit was under way before sunrise, and concluded at 12. 47 pm.
Apart from a fleeting gap in the cloud when the image of the Sun appeared on our whiteboard, and then disappeared just as quickly, we saw nothing. Though we had to admit defeat for our own observations, we overcame our disappointment by watching the excellent webcast from Mauna Kea throughout the morning. As we watched the final egress some students expressed the hope that they may have better luck in 2117. Who knows?!