The Venus transit of the Sun of June 5, 2012, taken at the time of third contact when Venus was just departing from the face of the sun.
Prime focus image. I wrapped the Dobsonian's open truss work in black cloth, and used a piece of clamped-down construction cardboard to stop down the aperture to an off-axis 8" (200mm) hole. Thus what is normally an f/5 scope was instead f/12.5 for this shot. The placement of the hole avoided the diagonal mirror's mounting vanes in the light path, to eliminate their diffraction flares. The hole was fitted with Baader ND 5 filter film, which passed 1/100,000th of the incoming light.
I used an old-fashioned shutter release cable with the Nikon to prevent 'scope shake.
Nikon D100 at ISO 400, single 8msec exposure.
Observing site: Summerlin, NV USA
Unguided; untracked.
Wiki page for this event:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_transit_of_Venus
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