This is an admittedly impressionistic take on the Venus transit of 2012. No doubt there are already countless pristine images available all over the web, as well as live feed (while it lasts) and videos. I didn’t really make advance preparations – just piled all the filters I have onto my longest lens, stopped down, and waited for some additional light blockage by thin clouds. No tripod. So … conditions far from ‘ideal’, but for someone involved in the field of images, it would be more embarrassing not to have any picture of this at all.

Here’s a less impressionistic image made by projecting the sun onto a sheet of paper using binoculars. Again, impromptu & handheld:

Exercise for the reader: why is the above image bluish?

One final image of the transit taken at about 12:30 p.m. towards the end of the show. This was made holding the binoculars in one hand and my digital camera in the other. Hence the blur. Distortion of the shape of the suns disk in the following image (and the previous one) is a result of a non-flat projection screen, and non-orthogonal projection angle.

Next photo-op? 2117.