Venus Transit

June 5, 2012

On Saturday June 2 we took a drive up to northern AZ scouting out a cooler location to view the transit from. I thought Schnebly Hill road might get us up high enough to get a good view before sunset and provide a comfortable viewing location. We took a look around the parking area that the jeep tours normally use and decided that might get too crowded and dusty. Looking across the road to the south we spotted a rock ledge that might work and gets us away from anyone that might be driving the road on the 5th. This is the view from the selected location. Hopefully it would be less cloudy on transit day and with any luck there wouldn't be as much haze from the fire down at Crown King.

I arranged to work only a half day on June 5th and we headed up towards Schnebly Hill around 12:00. It was a bit windy on the ledge that day and I didn't get set up quite as quick as I would have liked. One of our early shots at around 15:19 MST and venus has broken into the disk of the sun. This view is through a solar funnel as shown on my earlier solar eclipse page Solar Eclipse - May 20, 2012. The solar funnel had been improved upon with the addition of some rear projection screen material for the viewing surface. Note that several sun spots show up as faint dots towards the center of the image.
 


The view at 15:25  with venus showing as a full circle at the edge of the solar disk.

This view at 15:51 provides a sharper image and the sun spots seem to show up a little better. We had moved the scope to another location a little further up the hill that provided better protection from the wind coming up the canyon and up over the ledge.

The following image was taken through my Canon 200 mm L series lens with a solar filter. Note that this image is right side up compared to the rotated images through the scope because of the optics. This shot was at 16:04.



 Another shot through the sun funnel at 16:27.

By 19:20 our view looked like this through the sun funnel.

At 19:21 we see some obstacles enter the view of the sun funnel as the sun starts to disappear beyond the distant hill. Note that this image has been rotated by 180 degrees as compared to all of the other sun funnel images above.

At 19:22 we have a whole forest at the bottom of the image.

A few seconds later and venus is about to disappear behind a large pine. That will be the end of the show.