Astrophotography by Rob Kantelberg

Venus Transit

June 8, 2004

On June 8th 2004 this rare celestial event took place again and it was perfectly observable from the Netherlands. For my observation site the circumstances where perfect, starting at 15° altitude and ending at 61° altitude, I could see the whole transit from my backyard. For an explanation of this rare event please click here.

Transit parameters for my home place (51°34'15" North, 5°28'15" East).

Event	Time	Azimuth Sun	Altitude Sun
External ingress	05:19:52 UT	72.1°	15.2°
Internal ingess	05:39:42 UT	75.8°	18.2°
Maximum transit	08:22:31 UT	108.8°	43.1°
Internal egress	11:03:52 UT	164.2°	60.6°
External egress	11:23:21 UT	173.4°	61.2°

I decided to devide the whole transit into three parts, the ingress, the path of Venus over the Sun and the egress.

The ingress was captured with my 150mm Newton telescope in prime focus (F=940mm) with a Baader sunfilter and a ToUcam Pro.
During the ingress I made 1 image/second each with an exposure time of 1/100s.


05^h25^m10^s UT	05^h30^m10^s UT	05^h35^m10^s UT	05^h40^m10^s UT

Animation of the ingress

At the end of the ingress the so called black drop effect could be seen.


05^h39^m15^s UT	05^h39^m52^s UT	05^h40^m06^s UT	05^h40^m38^s UT

Animation of this black drop effect

The path of Venus over the Sun was captured with a 250mm telelens with a Baader sunfilter and a ToUcam Pro. During this session I made 1 image per 15 seconds each with an exposure time of 1/1000s.


05^h45^m02^s UT	07^h29^m47^s UT	09^h15^m17^s UT	10^h54^m47^s UT

Animation of the path of Venus

The egress was captured with my 150mm Newton telescope and 2x barlow (F=2400mm) with a Baader sunfilter and a ToUcam Pro.
During the ingress I made 1 image/second each with an exposure time of 1/33s.


11^h03^m53^s UT	11^h09^m53^s UT	11^h15^m53^s UT	11^h21^m53^s UT

Animation of the egress

© Copyright Rob Kantelberg