{"id":719,"date":"2004-06-12T09:36:05","date_gmt":"2004-06-12T09:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2004\/06\/transit_of_venu\/"},"modified":"2004-06-12T09:36:05","modified_gmt":"2004-06-12T09:36:05","slug":"transit_of_venu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2004\/06\/transit_of_venu\/","title":{"rendered":"Transit of Venus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are some wonderful images from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.open2.net\/astronomy\/index.html\">Transit of Venus<\/a> across the Sun on Tuesday. Obviously I wanted to observe this myself in the best possible way. On Monday I read an article in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.astronomy.com\/home.asp\">Astronomy<\/a> magazine that said I need a solar filter. OK, where do I get one of those for my camcorder at short notice in North Norfolk? Well there&#8217;s a place called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?hl=en&#038;lr=&#038;ie=UTF-8&#038;q=%22cley+spy%22&#038;btnG=Search\">Cley Spy<\/a> (in a village quite close to Cley-next-the-sea) which sells a massive range of binoculars and telescopes. Why should such a good shop exist in such a remote location? Becaue North Norfolk is bird watching country (Sidebar: &#8220;Twitchers&#8221; are something entirely different to your average bird watcher. Don&#8217;t confuse the two). Anyhow, they didn&#8217;t have a filter.<br \/>\nStep two was to design some kind of tripod to hold a pair of binoculars. Sadly, without either a full workshop to build such a contraption, or indeed the skills to make it, I had to forget about this idea. Next up was to make my own filter after watching a bit of Adam Hart-Davis on the BBC&#8217;s coverage of the transit. You have to filter out 95% of sunlight or so. I can now reveal that three blue-tinted freezer bags folded back on themselves many times, and secured around the lens of a camcorder <i>does not<\/i> work.<br \/>\nFinally it was a pair of binoculars with one lens covered up projecting the image onto white card. This worked fine, but required two hands so I couldn&#8217;t get any photos of it.<br \/>\nNow roll on the <a href=\"http:\/\/saturn.jpl.nasa.gov\/index.cfm\">Cassini<\/a> probe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are some wonderful images from the Transit of Venus across the Sun on Tuesday. Obviously I wanted to observe this myself in the best possible way. On Monday I read an article in Astronomy magazine that said I need a solar filter. OK, where do I get one of those for my camcorder at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}