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The view of the Venus transit from eastern North America (W. Lebanon, NH, in this case) was partially obscured due to the transit being mid-crossing by the time the Sun rose, so only the last part of it could be photographed in this composite. Of these five images of Venus, the last two are Contact III and IV, at 11:06:33 and 11:25:59 UT. North is up and West is right in this photo. The setup I used. Cheap monocular projected Sun image to bright-white paper on a foam-core board scrap. I hand-held my Coolpix 4500 to make the photo. Jerry's shadow-cone method would have significantly increased the contrast in the image, but I was lazy. Sophisticated monocular mounting system allowed gravity to provide a gradual drifting of the Sun's image.

Ah. You've found me out. (Perhaps you suspected something like this?) In TRW, I woke up at 5:15 a.m., eager to capture the rare transit. I looked out the window to the densest fog I've seen in weeks. :-( There was no chance that it would clear in an hour or so. So I comforted myself by cruising the Web for live webcams of the transit, which were stunning. The best overall site I found was from Astronomy magazine. Then I found out that Jerry, who lives near me but farther away from the fog-engine called the Connecticut River, and also higher by 500 feet, had taken a great image. Sigh. Next time...

So when the fog lifted hours later, I did as I described on this page but also (since there was no Venus in the image!) added a black paper dot to the white projection paper, which you can see in the earlier photo. (You may also have noticed that the Sun was a tad high in the sky for a sunrise series!) Here's a close-up of "Venus":

handy Venus

The resulting image, when superimposed at 50% opacity on Jerry's (real) photo for comparison, showed that the dot was way too big and too well-defined. A little Photoshop magic, and cloning of the now smaller and fuzzy dot to make a 5-image series completed the fraud! Hope you liked it. ;-)