Venus Transit 2012-06-06

I took a half day off to experience my first and last Venus transit (this is the kind of event that warrants the use of vacation leaves anyway). I got up early in order to capture the first phase of the transit - the 1st contact point. Although at this point no planet is visible because the disk of the planet is merely touching the disk of the sun while it is still outside the sun's disk. I wasn't given a chance to record the initial contact because almost after setting up my scope, clouds covered up the sun.

The first image of the transit was photographed through the clouds using a few seconds exposure.

The pattern of clouds coming in and going out repeated several times during the course of the event. At one point, I was getting bored of the cloudy transit event and started looking for something to shoot. I heard our resident Olive backed sunbird and decided to try imaging it.

About an hour before the last contact, rain started pouring. I figured there's no point in waiting for the sun to come up again and decided to call it a day.

These are some of the images I took during this rare event.

During moments of clear/cloudless sun

  

A sunspot