It was a thoroughly impressive morning. The experts took time to talk to and answer questions of the "kids" that were there and there were many. What impressed me the most, was that none of them had to do all that! There were some mighty impressive instruments there and I am not talking about size!

Regarding the photo below: This is third contact when the limb of Venus touches the edge of the sun's disc as it starts to emerge from the transit. Please note the "optical illusion" of a tear drop affect... this is not real, just an illusion obviously! But very interesting.

Anyway, while we were there the astronomy club had a display outside with a big reflector telescope and they were giving away those special glasses to view the sun with. They were all excited about "The Transit" coming up and while I like astronomy, I didn't quite grasp what the big deal was.

Well, come Tuesday, I was really surprised, with the use of those glasses, how much more impressive this event was to witness than I had previously thought. I shared those with some of my neighbors and we were all surprised how clearly visible the disc of Venus was even without magnification.

Then I got a bright idea...and the dumbest idea I ever had. I got my binoculars out. Hey, with these ultra-sunproof glasses on, why not take a look close up? Well we did...all of us, and it was even more spectacular. Almost three dimensional as compared to the flat view you saw on TV. We could even see the sunspots in other areas of the sun's disc.

Now you remember when you were a kid a used a magnifying glass to focus sunlight on, say, a leaf? It eventually smoked and burned a hole through the leaf right? Was I thinking of this while viewing this once in a lifetime experience through my binoculars?

No.

All of the sudden, while I was taking a turn using them, things got real bright. Folks, don't ever do this. I managed to melt two tiny holes in those "welder's glasses" which could well have done the same thing to my eyeballs. In hindsight, it is totally obvious, but in the excitement of the moment nobody, and I mean of a good group of adults with children, thought of the possibility.

Fortunately, it seems no permanent damage was done. The exposure was incredibly brief. I have been using telescopes since I was a kid, and would never dream of looking directly at the sun with one. Just please be aware of the warnings that you hear repeated everytime an eclipse or something similar comes up, and think about how you might fall into an inadvertent trap like this.

These photos were taken through a 4" Celestron refractor using an Orion glass solar filter, 24MM Panoptic eyepiece, and an inexpensive ($100) Nikon Coolpix camera that was just held up to the eyepiece by hand.

I have attached several other images taken with the same equipment during the transit.

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Originally posted by Dan Lorraine:
This is the last view that we had of the setting sun (approximately 7:20 p.m. PST) as it slipped behind "Mary's Mesa" and created this nice "artsy" image).

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