Here's my efforts from today. I took my scope in to my kid's primary school for the transit, and the weather cooperated nicely. I did a little Powerpoint presentation for about 75 grade 5 kids, then showed nearly 200 grade 5 and grade 4 kids the transit (by projecting an image onto a white sheet of paper in a black bucket). I quickly lost count of how many times I heard "that's awesome!". Most of the students seemed to be interested, and I had some good questions from some of them.
I also took along my camera and 70-200mm telephoto with a home-made Baader filter, and grabbed a few images. The first image is the setup at school, and the rest are of the transit (all 100% crops from the telephoto lens at 200mm).
Nice work! I was quite surprised by how much interest the transit has generated amongst people who otherwise would not be interested in astronomy.
How does the image projection work? I see you have the telescope cap with the smaller aperture cap removed (no solar filter, presumably) - is there an eyepiece attached?
Yes, Dave, I had a 20mm eyepiece in, but the focus was adjusted to the plane of the paper. Works well if there are lots of kids lining up to have a look!
I told my 10 year old son last night that he might dream of the transit of venus, and he said no, he would dream of being on an asteroid watching a transit of earth! Now that would be cool!
I was quite surprised by how much interest the transit has generated amongst people who otherwise would not be interested in astronomy.
