This image was taken at the beginning of the 2012 transit of Venus across the face of the Sun. This was taken a few minutes after Venus first touched the Sun, which is referred to as first contact. First contact is the moment that the apparent disk of Venus is tangent to the apparent disk of the Sun on the way in toward the Sun. In other words, first contact is the ingress moment of exterior contact. Second contact is the moment during ingress that the apparent disk of Venus is surrounded by the disk of the Sun. Actually measuring the moment of second contact, if done from two places on Earth separated by a great distance in latitude, would theoretically allow us to calculate the size of the solar system, because of the parallax effect upon the time that these events would appear to occur for the two different observers. However, the black drop effect introduced considerable errors into the measurement of the exact moment of second contact.
This image was taken near the beginning of the transit from my backyard in Scottsdale, Arizona, using a Canon EOS Digital Rebel SLR camera on a Takahashi FCT-150 refractor with a Thousand Oaks Optical Type 2+ solar filter.
The Sun & Venus
June 5, 2012
Image by Sid Leach
Scottsdale, Arizona
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