2012 - Transit of Venus

I was tasked with getting the local university observatory The Morehead Observatory. (Side note: I also made that website.) capable of observing the sun. For those of you that don’t know - the sun is bright… really bright. You need to eliminate almost all of the light hitting the telescope if you want to observe the sun with it. NOTE: don’t try this unless you know what you’re doing.

I ended up going with a company called Thousand Oaks Optical to purchase the full aperature filter to put over the 24” telescope’s Optical Tube Assembly (OTA). The lightweight filter didn’t require rebalancing the telescope. I don’t see the model I ordered on the site for a 24” telescope anymore (RG-15750A) but it looked like:

Solar Filter

I also ended up using an inline H-alpha filter(I believe) to double down on filtering the light.

Finally, the goal was to set up a streaming website and create two python scripts to 1) take exposures with the astronomical camera (Apogee U47) 2) upload any newly saved files in the image directory to a server so the stream would show the latest image.

I tested these scripts extensively and got it working such that I only had to entertain the guests and babysit a little instead of trying to do anything with the imaging process on the day of the transit.

I wasn’t prepared for how many people showed up though, hah. It was a little stressful in the moment, especially when the clouds rolled in and we lost sight of the event. We got a few more images before the sun set below the elevation limit of the telescope. However, I was able to capture many images of the event, and afterward I created a video and uploaded to YouTube.