Hi everyone,

I have managed to catch glimpses of the Venus Transit through the cloudy New Zealand skies, and was also able to take a few photos!







Is anyone else following along, and possibly taken some photos?

-Mark-

Very cool, thanks for posting these.

Those pictures are Awesome, Mark!

I was just watching a NASA video about this - quite amazing stuff!

Thanks for posting the photos! I was hoping to see it in person, but the entire east coast of the US has been under cloud cover for about a week now

We missed the supermoon, too! D: Mother nature, you have 115 more years to be cloudy. Stop picking the days when something interesting actually happens!

I was able to see it when some clouds cleared out. It looked like a tiny black speck on the sun. I was only able to view it for about 4 minutes as after that it was covered by clouds for the entire time the sun was above the tree line.

Went to a friend's place to watch. The sky was perfectly clear all the way until sunset. Got some decent pictures:

Also, for kicks, here's one of my favorites from the many many pictures I took of the eclipse from a few weeks ago:

MDW - those pictures are amazing! But shame about the insect crawling across the lens.

Amazing, thanks for the photos, here in Belgium we should have seen the end of the transit at sunrise, it's raining!

In Hungary, it was raining yesterday, and it is cloudy today, but for the transit (we could see the last 2 hours) There was sunshine! Incredible.
I had a chance to visit an observatory, where a large crowd gathered with many telescopes, including some really good ones (like H-alpha sun telescope), So it was a really great fun to be there.
I do not have a telescope (yet), but still, I was able to catch the transit with my Cannon camera. Will upload some photos later (after some editing).

I really wanted to see it, and was very excited, but unfortunately it was pretty cloudy where I was. I did see first and second contact however, but only through eclipse glasses. All solar filters were sold out. It was still pretty amazing.

Callum

Couple of pics. It was really cool seeing it with the naked eye (with proper protection). It was cloudy where I live so I ended up flying down to Vegas for the event.
Worth it.

Tried taking pics with several different filters. This one ended up being the best. I don't know exactly what kind it was, but it was some kind of glass filter and looked yellower than the pic seems.


For the annular eclipse I wasn't really prepared that well and was using just some old exposed film so that's why it's blurrier.

Great pictures.
Here's an amazing video of the transit taken by the NOAA satellite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTW2YNj_4-U

(can you believe that little thing is a giant planet?!)

If you think our sun looks big, check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1w8hKTJ2Co
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8CgDGhYKe8

Yeah I'm always impressed by how big these hypergiants still can get 13 B years into the age of the universe. They burn so fast and die so young that you'd think matter would have dispersed enough by now to prevent them from growing this massive.

I wonder how crazy huge the hypergiants of 5+ billion years ago got?

I think most have formed only quite recently.

On the topic of space trivia: If you were standing on the north (or south) pole of Mars, what can you not see even with a telescope? It's not anything on Mars. It's something you can see from other places on Mars and even from Earth.

Just from the wording of the question, I'm going to assume the north and south poles happen to be in craters and say the answer is the sun. That's just a guess.

Carl

I believe there are spots on the moon like that, but no, that's not the answer I'm looking for.

One of the two moons?

Close enough. You can't see either of the moons. Both their orbits are so small that they're below the horizon. You need to be below 70.4/82.7 degrees latitude to see Phobos/Deimos respectively.

btw, you're the first person I know who's guessed that without getting additional clues.

Not that these means much but that would have been my second guess.

Carl

To me it was obvious: it had to be roughly aligned to the equator (half way between north and south poles), close enough to lie below the horizon, but not on the actual planet as you said, so it must be something in orbit around the planet...