I should have posted this sooner, but life got in the way and it slipped my mind. The transit of Venus is today. This is literally a once in a lifetime event (well, ok, twice thanks to orbital mechanics). Today's transit is the second of the pair of transits, so the next one isn't until well after our time. NASA will be covering the event live from an observatory in Hawaii, and Don Pettit plans to photograph the transit from aboard the ISS. Enjoy. Transit of Venus coverage at NASA.gov.
I think only kid-mod has an outside chance of seeing the next one, seeing as it's not until 2117. If you're in the right zone get outside (with something to view safely like a welding mask or PROPER sun viewing glasses/scopes, even the writeable part of a DVD will work sometimes) and look, it's your last chance EDIT: Should add that it's at sunset for you lot across the pond, for us here it's sunrise tomorrow
So, is anybody watching any of the live streams? I tried to use a number of different lenses to project an image onto a matt board, but for some reason I could not see Venus. Too bad. Fortunately, there are a number of resources available to see it online.
I would have had a chance if I could be bothered to get up early enough and it wasn't horribly cloudy this Wigan morning. And no, I won't live that long!
It was clouded over for me sadly, I caught a tiny glimpse just before it made fourth contact and that was all. Oh well, next big celestial event is the Perseid meteor shower in august, fingers crossed for that one.
I watched some of the live stream from the NASA page about 0:00-01:00, great to see it, but would have been great to see properly. At least there have been a few events that I've been lucky enough to see that won't happen again in my lifetime (probably).
I'm not sure how quickly life expectancy is rising, but I would say its not unlikely that a couple of other people might.
A welding mask okay to use then? Didn't think it was going to be visible here, so didn't bother getting up. Might have been an alright sunrise too, as it's quite sunny here now, cloudy, but sunny.
Some great photo potentials around here! One skilled photographer even got a once in a lifetime shot!
In case anyone is interested, the JSC Photo group has a nice collection of images on their Flickr page.
