The observing team comprised four students (Daniel Burgess, Roxy Christer, Aya Shibahara, Grace Thompson) and two staff (Glen Cowan and Pedro Teixeira-Dias).

During ingress we were on our own as it was so early. During egress we set up a video for people to watch in the teaching lab since we couldn't afford any glitches during the timing measurements. But between we had lots of visitors.

Our main telescope is an equatorially mounted Meade LX200 located inside our observatory dome. This is a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with a 10-inch (250 mm) primary mirror. The CCD camera, seen mounted on the rear cell of the scope, is controlled by the computer (left).

In addition we used a 4.5-inch (114 mm) Meade 4504 Newtonian reflector on the roof of the Wilson Lab just outside the dome.

Both telescopes used similar CCD cameras cobbled together out of relatively inexpensive webcams, the Logitech Quickcam Pro 3000.

The solar filters were made using AstroSolar film from Baader Planetarium GmbH. This is a white light filter with a transmission of around 1/100,000. Filters were also made for the spotting scopes.

Other people in the Department were using different techniques to see the transit. Stuart Flockton took this picture by projecting the image of the sun through binoculars onto a piece of paper.

Back to RHUL Venus Transit page