Location: Bismarck Observatory south of Munich

At the location of my own backyard observatory with its 13 inch Newton-Telescope the view to the northeastern and eastern horizon is very limited by big trees. Therefore I decided to observe the transit at the Bismarck observatory, whose owner is Christoph "Haley" Ries, night assistant at Wendelstein observatory of the University of Munich.

I borrowed a MAM20 german eqatorial mount with computer control from Manfred Mauz, who runs a workshop for manufacturing telescopes mounts (MAM Astronomiegerätebau).

The telescope, a 3.5inch Lichtenknecker refractor (f=1300mm), was set up in the afternoon before the transit and adjusted in the evening under a wonderful clear sky.

Early in the morning the last preparations were done and obervation started with the prominence viewer, but I failed in detecting the black disk of Venus in the straylight of the instrument. However, I could observe and film a very beautiful prominence before I switched to the the transit, which I filmed with my SONY DCR-TRV50E digital camcorder through a BAADER Herschel wedge and a projection eyepiece of 25mm folcal length. For further reduction of the image brightness I used a combination of neutral filters ND=3 and ND=2 and sometimes a green filter (Wratten no. 11), to improve the view of the granules.

Venus in front of the granules. Image stacked with GIOTTO from a video-clip around 06:47UT of 20sec duration. Eypiece of 12mm focal length for projection

Unsharp masking and contrast and brightness balance with GIMP.

Click here to see a time-lapse DivX-movie (25x, size abouot 1.5 MB) of the egress phase.

Venus in front of the granules. Image stacked with Registax from a video-clip around 07:34UT of 15sec duration. Eypiece of 25mm focal length for projection

Unsharp masking and contrast and brightness balance with GIMP.

The following images, processed with GIOTTO   from avi-files of 15 second length, show the ingress for every minute:

Selected single frame from the video, green filter (Wratten No 11), only correction of brightness and contrast

11:05:30 UT