the transit of venus

the transit of venus

Transit of Venus 2012

11mo ago
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Description

This was the transit of Venus across the sun. I shot this video from Irvine, CA in front of my house 6/5 at around 6pm. My telescope is a Orion SpaceProbe 130ST, using a 25mm Sirius Plossl eyepiece giving 26x magnification. To give a sense of a scale of the sun's actual immense size, the sunspots you see are easily bigger than the earth (the sun is about 109 earth diameters across). Venus is about the same size as the earth, and I find it fascinating that if the earth were about a third of the way closer to the sun, this is what it would look like. Everything we have ever known on earth is just a tiny little ball floating in space.