June 5th Transit of Venus Observed using a Reflecting Pinhole Camera
2012-06-06
Yesterday I was curious to see how Hugh Hunt's Reflecting Pinhole Camera method would work for seeing the Transit of Venus. It's safe, and you never look directly at the sun. Here's his method:
http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh/transit.htm
I set up a mirror on the bird food container, taping black paper with a 1" x 1" square cut out of it, over the mirror, and angling the reflection of the sun into our garage where I set up a whiteboard to project the image of the sun onto.
It took some experimentation to get the right distance from the mirror to the garage. At first the image had no detail, but was very bright. hmmm. Then I made the opening in the paper smaller, the image got dimmer, and voila! The Transit of Venus revealed itself! Venus is the little black dot at the bottom of the pale reflected disk of the sun. In some pictures you can see the leaves of the trees that the sun was passing behind also captured by the Reflecting Pinhole Camera. (Looking at these images, it is almost better not to double click on the photo for a larger image, as the little dot of Venus gets blurry.)
Cool, the next time this happens is in 2115 or so. Thanks Hugh Hunt for this tip!
