Transit of Venus, June 8th, 2004
Observed from Monterosso Al Mare, Italy
Margaret Bourdeaux and I traveled to Monterosso Al Mare,
one of the five towns of Cinque Terre, Italy, to observe
the Transit of Venus of June 8th, 2004.
We used a small telescope (a Meade ETX-90 AT) in a polar
axis configuration on a portable tripod to obtain more
than 100 images during the transit. We observed the
event with both a white light neutral density filter
(a Kendrick Solar Filter), and an H-alpha filter (a Lumicon 0.15-nm Solar
Prominence Filter), and three different eyepieces (Meade's
26-mm Super-Plossl, 13.8-mm Super-Wide-Angle, and
6.7-mm Ultra-Wide-Angle). The images were recorded with
a digital camera (a Canon Powershot SD110). The camera
was not attached to the telescope -- I simply held it
up to the eyepiece.
I'll try to upload the best
of these images over the next couple days, but here is one
for the time being.
Dave Charbonneau, 11 June 2004
This white light image was taken just after
the moment of second contact. No processing
has been done to the image.
I ran a simple edge-detection algorithm on
the image above, and increased the contrast
to make the resulting outline more visible.