Transit of Venus in progress

[Chromatix]

http://go.nasa.gov/L9jaOr

https://twitter.com/#!/NASA

[Elspeth]

here are a list of webcasts from all over the world

http://venustransit.nasa.gov/webcasts/

[Chromatix]

[TheSHAD0W]

This was a really tough pic to get. Venus is at 1 o'clock. No, that's not dirt on your monitor.

[Chromatix]

Yeah, I don't have the equipment for solar photography at all. I'd probably burn out my cameras if I tried.

What I do have however is an old SLR - the electronics and shutter mechanism have corroded into uselessness - that I can put into "stop down metering" mode, so the light goes through the closed iris before reaching the ground-glass in the viewfinder. That makes an acceptable viewing instrument, so I'll probably go out and climb a local hill fairly soon while the sun is rising.

[Chromatix]

Okay, I found some people with much better equipment on the hill, and one of them managed to get a good picture at the beginning of sunrise, with an appropriately sized dot on it. There were only small gaps in the cloud, however, so I wasn't able to see it myself.

In fact there were bigger gaps in the cloud elsewhere, but I would have had to travel significantly further north to see the sun through them.

The NASA coverage is still ongoing, lots of pictures from a variety of sources, including Australia, Hawaii, Spitzbergen, and the ISS.