Transit of Venus!!

oh my gosh, wow!! Isn't this cool? Below is a photo of the planet Venus beginning its transit across the sun...

(and no, we didn't take this photograph; I borrowed it from Reuters/NASA). Our efforts weren't quite so successful.

I tried the 'pinhole-in-a-piece-of-paper' method, which failed miserably. Tom found out that we could use the binoculars to focus the light onto a surface, which did work. (it was very bright, though, which is why the contrast in these photos is just ridiculous. I did what I could with them.)

He held the binoculars as steady as possible, and focused them as much as possible-- it was really cool! We could actually see Venus, and Tom, with his super-sharp vision, could actually see three or four sunspots, as well. Over the course of the couple hours we could see it, I took well over 80 photographs. It was frustrating, because we could see Venus by looking at it, but I couldn't figure out how to set the camera to actually capture the image. In those 80+ photos, I actually (amazingly, and I don't know how I did it) got a couple photos that actually worked!

Here's one that I did a lot of processing on; cropped it really close, and I think changed it to 'heat map' to cut down (some) on the contrast. The large green disk is the sun, and the light green dot, there, is actually Venus!!

Here's the clearest photo I got... Venus is clearly visible in this one!! It was hot (and sunny) outside, and most of the photos didn't work, but it was definitely worth all the effort to see this!


(PS: I didn't have time to do any art journaling, what with trying to see Venus and all, but I'll be back with some more journal pages soon.)

random photos from the past week or so

fun mail earlier this week from my sister Jackie... Our Lady of Guadalupe dishtowel, embroidered on a flour sack towel by my Mom... cool embroidery pattern by Sublime Stitching!

The planet Venus, taken by Tom with our regular digital camera. Taken earlier today thru the telescope in our backyard. Venus has been extraordinarily bright the last few weeks in the early evening and into the night, but it's actually so bright that it can be seen during the day, too... pretty cool, considering Venus is actually 25 million miles away when it's closest to Earth!!

Bisbee's newest trick, "Shake." It's hard to believe she's going to be a year old next month!!

Sedona and Bisbee, actually sharing the chair for a few moments. This is a rare occurrence, since usually when they get close to each other, they end up wrestling and chasing each other thru the house.