11 June 2004

The historic 2004 transit of Venus

The historic transit of Venus on 8 June, the first since 1882, attracted the attention of many thousands of scientists and non-scientists around the world. Many amateur astronomers observed and photographed the event, including Mark Streitman, President of the New Jersey Chapter of the Society for Amateur Scientists (SAS).

Mark's article about the transit, and his superb photographs of the historic event, are featured in this week's issue of The Citizen Scientist.

We also received a pair of nice transit photographs from Ralph Genetti, who holds a Ph.D. in chemistry, and who is also an amateur astronomer. The photographs shown here were made with the telescope his children gave him for Christmas a few years ago. We learned about this from his daughter, Heather Smith, who works for SAS as the Director of Program Development for LABRats.

The transit of Venus just before moving away from the solar disk at 7:00 AM local time in Akron, Ohio. Photograph by Ralph Genetti. Click image to enlarge. .

Dr. Genetti writes, "Here are two of the photographs that I took of the Venus transit of the Sun. For the first one [above] I didn't need the solar filter, because the sun was low, and it was hazy. For the second [left], the last one I took, I used the filter, but the Sun was still not at full brightness. It was too bright without the filter and not quite bright enough with it. It was really impressive to see.

"The magnification of the pictures is less than what I could see with the telescope using the various eyepieces. The day before, when I was practicing, I could see sun spots with the telescope, but they don't quite show in these pictures.

"The event lasted about 6 hours, but was near the end by the time the sun came up in Akron. The two photographs were taken at 6:10 AM and 7:00 AM."

The next transit of Venus will occur in 2012. The next transit after that will not occur for 105 years.

Forrest M. Mims III.