Thursday, May 31, 2012

Periscopic images of Pearl Harbor

A picture of the USS Missouri and the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor taken through the periscope at the submarine museum.


Looking through a different periscope at the early ICBM's at Pearl Harbor.

Friday, May 25, 2012

Practicing with my new Solarscope for the Transit of Venus

The image of the sun with a sunspot.

The orange tube has a lens which focuses the image on a convex mirror which makes the bigger image of the sun.

I think I am ready with my main device for viewing the transit of Venus.  This is an eight year old dream of mine to own one of these Solarscopes.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Practicing solar photography in anticipation of the Transit of Venus.

I made a quick solar scope with binoculars, a clamp, a cardboard shield, and a white paper screen.  You can see at least three sunspot clusters that I confirmed are real using a real solar observatory website.

All this is practice for the transit of Venus that we will observe in Hawaii on June 5th.  There will be much more professional observers there so this is my backup to the backup.