To add some more substance to all this picture taking yesterday, with the help of my relative who lives in Europe, I tried to measure the Venus parallax..
The result of superposition of 3 frames (his frame of third contact was rescaled, rotated and registered on the combination of two frames I took with time difference of ~5 hours) is attached..
The red path was as visible from Maribor, Slovenia, the blue one was as visible from Melbourne.
During those 5 hours, Sun also rotated, and this is visible on the final picture as double sunspots.
Image is original scale, 1.1arcsec/pixel (MTO1100A, Canon400D in prime focus). On the picture, North is to the left.
Last edited by bojan; 07-06-2012 at 10:19 AM.
Reason: mis-spelling
Just saw a bbc horizons programme explaining cook's journey, haley's parallax principle and how they calculated the distance between the sun and the earth using venus in the 1760's accurate to one percent.
Incredible stuff for those ancient times - 93,726,900 miles.
an illustration with your calculations would be very educative bojan.
Is there an explanation to the "black drop effect" as seen in Cook's drawings?
Wish there was a push to challenge amateurs in calculating distances just like you're doing.
