Once in a lifetime Opportunity

I do a lot of solar imaging. Yesterday I was shooting from my Garage and was all setup to see Venus go across the Sun when the clouds rolled in. Venus transits the sun 2x every 100 years. The last time was in 2004 so after yesterday it will not happen again in my lifetime. The clouds that came in were Texas sized cotton candy lightning and thunder clouds so I packed all my equipment up and came inside. 20 minutes later I walked outside to bring in the trash can and found that the clouds had cleared and the Sun was visible again. I figured it was too late so I came back in but my neighbors came over and asked if I was going to set up my telescope. I didn't want to disappoint them so I brought it all out again and we all took a long look at the transit of Venus across the solar disk. I use an H-alpha type telescope. It filters a <.7 angstrom slice of the Hydrogen Alpha absorption line on the light spectrum and is able to show all the little details on the Sun. I took the images with a Monochromatic CCD camera and colorized the images after shooting. I shot these from my garage in Flower Mound.

Gallery