Transit of Venus

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Transit of Venus, Boulder, Colorado, June 5, 2012. This picture was taken by projecting an image of the sun onto a smooth, white cardboard, using an 8x25 monocular fixed to a tripod. The eyepiece of the monocular was adjusted to project an image approximately 0.5 m from the eyepiece. The monocular had a pair of erecting prisms, so the image at the focus of the objective is erect; the image on the screen is therefore inverted. The printing on the cardboard was an aid to focusing; the camera was handheld. Unfortunately, there was a cloud cover most of the day; if you look closely, you can see both clouds and sunspots.
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Photograph by David Young. This picture was taken with an SLR camera with a 270-mm lens and a solar filter, all mounted on a tripod.