11:10 a.m. BST

11:35 a.m. BST

The newspapers suddenly began writing about June's transit of Venus on Wednesday, May 8th of 2004. Why? Because the Royal Astronomical Society issued a press release about it on this date. As the day of the event grew closer, and the facts disappeared deeper and deeper into filing systems, the hype began.
   Of course, transits of Venus are not common events, like eclipses caused by the Moon. The last one was on 6th December in 1882, which meant that no living person on the planet had seen a transit before today's, and the last one visible in its entirety from the UK was in 1283 (when no one knew it was happening). And as the next transit of Venus visible in the UK will not be until 2247, it was a question of miss this one and you'd had it! But a transit is hardly the spectacular event that some hacks were unloading on their readers.
   Naturally, Tuesday June 8th started off with enough cloud about to reinforce the native pessimism of experienced observers of astronomical events in Romiley. The day was bright enough but the sky was white rather than blue and those wandering around in sunglasses could see lower clouds hovering in front of an overall background of hazy, high cloud.
   The Sun did eventually burn off the haze and find its way into gaps between the lower clouds. Even so, the event was entirely missable because Venus passing in front of the Sun is hardly in the same class as the Moon crossing in front of our star. Anyone trying to see the transit using a conventional eclipse viewer of aluminized plastic film, or over-exposed photographic film, was out of luck. The tiny dark spot that was Venus wasn't big enough to be visible to the average naked eye. A pinhole in a piece of card was similarly ineffective in projecting an image big enough to show anything.
   The two images shown above were produced using binoculars. The sun's image was projected into the shadow of the binoculars on a large piece of card. A large card was necessary because we didn't have a clamp and holding heavy binoculars steady is no easy job. The system is captured in the title picture at the top of the page, which shows the sun's image with Venus in transit on the shadow of the binoculars, and the shadow of the pen camera.
   The projected images are inverted, which is why Venus; the tiny dark blob; is seen at the top right of the pictures rather than the bottom right. They were captured using a digital pen camera of the type used by members of Romiley Arts Federation to record the history of Romiley's new lamp posts. Finally, the image on the right was preserved from the large number of pictures taken in the hope of getting some that could be used. The shadow of the pen camera has created a bogus eclipse picture which seems to include a large sunspot.