[Mito (OP)]

Hi,

We've just finished for you a brand new model displaying transit as you will see it from your location:

newbielink:http://www.sunaeon.com/venustransit [nonactive]

of course it´s free and there are more features waiting too:
- all important event times, trajectory and sun's current position according to horizont
- for admins we are preparing the embedding utility

Enjoy

Mito and SunAeon team, creator of solarsystemscope.com and sunaeon.com

[syhprum]

I am disapointed that nowhere in my present home can I get a good view and convert a room into a "camera obscura" as I was able to do on the previous transit.
I may buy a tent if the weather looks like being good but at least I won't have to go to Tahiti.
Many Thanks to team. 

[imatfaal]

Syhprum - any hints/links on the easiest/best way to convert a bedroom to a camera obscura?  I think I might be in luck with the angles and elevation.

[syhprum]

You must cover the windows with some light tight materiel corrugated card board is pretty good with a hole thru which you can poke your tripod mounted telescope preferably behind an opened window.
Arrange the focus and direction of the telescope to project an image of the sun onto a white screen of about 50cm diameter and set up your camera to record set image.
all very easy if you have a suitable room. 
pictures to follow.
A proper camera obscura uses only a single lenses to image the outside world but this produces too small an image of the Sun to be useful so a telescope or binocular half of about 20X does a much better job (beware of direct viewing of the Sun thru the telescope unless there is a really dense filter is infront of the main lenses) projection in much better.

[Soul Surfer]

There is something very wrong with the transit track illustrations on this website.  The timings   (for the UK around 5am)  are reasonable but the trajectory shown is very weird and absolutely nothing like the true slightly angled simple linear trajectory about half way between the middle and the northern end of the sun.  only if you chose a location right at the top of the map is the transit track shown properly.  It is interesting to note that somewhere south of iceland the sun goes into transit just before sunset and will not come out until just after sunrise

[imatfaal]

I used Fourmilab yoursky to get the exact angle and elevation - checked last night and it will be damn close.  will give it a try.

[Soul Surfer]

Last time I went into our local town centre with my 8inch Schmitt Cassigrain reflector and projected the image onto a card in the shadow of the telescope to explain to the public what was going on.  I had quite an interested audience. This time it is so early in the morning and low in the sky and short it is hardly worth doing anything.

[syhprum]

I too do not think it worthwhile making too much effort to view this transit having successfully viewed and recorded the previous one.
Due to my unfortunate location it would entail much expense to set up a viewing site and thieves took my telescope two years back.
So I will give it a miss and leave it to the professionals