The Transit of Venus

I've mentioned before a website that both Jean and I love, that is Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog at Discover Masgazine. Phil used to work on the Hubble and is one of the most requested astronmoers out there, having wirtten several books, including "Death from the Skies", hosted his own series on the Discovery channel and many, many articles on the web.
His site has a bunch of web links for Tuesday's Transit of Venus across the sun. It's located HERE.
Unless you're going to be around for the next one in like, 117 years, now's your shot!
Enjoy....
dr

Reader Comments (4)
The local astronomy club is hosting a viewing party McAlpine Creek Park, off Monroe Road in Charlotte. (5pm - 8pm) Weather is not perfect but if we are lucky this will be literally the chance of a lifetime!
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/06/01/3285327/last-chance-to-see-venus-transit.html
Park is located off Monroe Road between Villiage Lake and Sardis:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=mcalpine+creek+park+charlotte+nc&ll=35.152161,-80.740478&spn=0.011983,0.019226&fb=1&gl=us&hq=mcalpine+creek+park+charlotte+nc&hnear=mcalpine+creek+park+charlotte+nc&cid=0,0,16208764795226960044&t=m&z=16&iwloc=A
Update - I just found out that Discovery Place is also hosting a viewing on the 3rd level of their parking deck.
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/06/02/3286361/astronomers-eager-to-see-venus.html
Well that was a bit of a bust. I went to McApline park and hung out for 2.5 hours watching the clouds block the sun. The clouds had been patchy up until about 6pm and then right before the event (6:09pm) they thickened up. A few keyholes in the clouds allowed a couple of lucky people to see the event. My daughter (Hope) was one of them. She was clustered around a solar projection telescope and along with a dozen folks she saw an image projected onto a white card which had clouds covering about 3/4's of the face of the sun but not the part where Venus was in transit over.
I had set my sites on watching the event through a Hydrogen Alpha filtered scope but it was not to be. The first one that I lined up behind was too low for some of the keyholes late in the day and took too long to adjust between keyholes. The second one (also a dedicated solar scope) could only be aimed when the sun was showing brightly - so it too took too long to reaim between openings - and in fact there were no openings after I lined up behind that scope. Oh well... 105 years isn't too long to wait is it? LOL
There are some great movies from the event, but from the NASA SOL observatory here's a lovely one... LINK