All this week we’ve been hearing about the transit of Venus,,,.. This is the last one for the next 105 years. Many commentators have been talking about this being the ‘last one in our lifetime’ . What a strange thought… It made me think about that great line in ‘wings of desire’ where the old man is staring at the sunset.. You hear him wonder how many sunsets more he will see.. Who knows…?

Anyway,, I had a busy day.. And worked until about 5:30. The transit was to start here at 6:09 so I had to scurry to get my telescope set up. I have an 8″ schmidt-cassegranian with computer drive.. I also have a solar filter made for a day like this About 5:45 it was raining pretty hard and overcast. Around 6 pm a bunch of our yoga friends showed up as I was frantically scanning the sky with my scope trying to find the sun through the clouds. It’s harder than it sounds because the dark filter makes everything but the sun black… . At night I could pick out a couple of stars and tell the scope to find the sun.. But in the daylight, there was nothing for me to use for alignment .So I was scanning it back and forth trying to locate the brightest thing in the sky. Finally right at 6:09 the sky cleared.. And there it was.. The sun with the tiniest bite out of the lower right as Venus started to kiss the disk of the sun. For the next half hour I had a steady stream of friends, family and passerby looking at the little black shadow of Venus as it crossed the bright white face of the sun.
It was truly amazing.. Around 7:15 the sky turned cloudy and it became to hard to manually track the sun.. So I packed up and moved in . What a cool sight ! It made me very happy to see something so pretty and so rare.. And so… Really there !!!!

Ok.. That’s it for now.. More tomorrow..
Nite all, nite Sam
-me