Transit of Venus 2012

On Wednesday 6 June 2012 ASV members keenly observed the Transit of Venus. To celebrate the occasion the ASV held an event in conjunction with the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne (pictured to the right) that allowed the general public to experience this rare astronomical event.

Although the last transit was only eight years ago, the next transit of Venus will not occur again until December 2117. There is an excellent fact sheet available from the Astronomical Society of Australia that can be downloaded here.

Fortunately the entire event was visible from most of Australia and New Zealand and many ASV members were able to take images and videos, some of which are presented below.

Index of Images

Bob Protuder

Venus transit egress animated GIF

Taken from Sandefjord, Norway.
305mm f5 dob stopped down to 70mm using white light filter.
Approximately 60 unprocessed images used for the animation of 3rd contact.
Canon EOS 550D and 2X Barlow at prime focus. ISO 320 at 1/60 sec.

Edwin Hernandez

Taken from St. Leonards, Victoria. Canon 400D, Prime Focus method plus a x2 barlow on a 200mm Dobsonian Telescope and photographic BAADER Solar Film

James McHugh

Time-lapse of the transit. Taken from Lake Mungo NSW with a Canon 500D camera, ED127 Telescope and EQ6 Mount

John Robinson

Taken from Bendigo

Prime focus through a FSQ106 with Baader solar filter using a Canon 300D DSLR.
Series of images processed and stacked in registax5.

Video of first and second contact of the transit:

Mark Justice

This image is mosaic of four images generated from four AVI's taken through the following set up:

102mm F5 refractor
Full aperture Baader visual foil filter
DMK21AU04 camera
615nm 24nm wide filter
IR block filter
30 second AVI's at 60fps
Location : Lake Mungo

Mark Sansom

Taken from Croydon Hills, hand held 25mm eyepiece projection through a 8"f5 Dob full aperture glass solar filter with a Canon D10.

Maurice Valimberti

Taken with the ASV's 100mm f/5 solar scope fitted with a Coronado solarmax 60 Ha filter. They were taken from the Old Melbourne Observatory grounds with a DMK21 firewire camera. Video stripped & processed with Astrostakkert & then sharpened with VC deconvolution.