A preying Manta captures Venus

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Images of rare and spectacular astronomical phenomena caught by AVT's Manta camera

Described as a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon occuring in a pattern that generally repeats every 243 years, transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable solar events. This event provided scientists with a number of other research opportunities particularly in the refinement of techniques to be used in the search for planets outside our solar system. Historically of great scientific significance, early obversations of the transit were used to calculate the first realistic estimates of the size of the solar system and although early astronomers knew each planet's relative distance from the Sun, an accurate absolute value of this distance was not possible. Credited with being part of the "dawn of British astronomy", Jeremiah Horrocks, an Englishman living in the 17th century, was the first man credited with observing the 1639 Venus transit. Horrocks used a simple telescope to focus the sun's image onto a piece of paper from which the image could be observed with safety. His resultant calculations produced a considered guess as to Venus' size and offered an estimate of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. While his calculations missed by a third the distance, they were more accurate than other popular measurements of the day. Cut to the present day and compare the observations of Oliver Stiehler, an amateur astronomer and photographer from Germany who captures images of astronomic phenomena and with various cameras fitted on his telescope, generates stop-motion videos of the course of planets, satellites or of international space stations. To observe the June, 2012 transit, Steihler used a variety of cameras including an AVT Manta G-125B monochrome camera fitted on a solar telescope with H-alpha filter.

Jeremiah Horrocks observing the Venus Transit in 1639. (Image from Wikipedia)	AVT Manta camera attached to Oliver Stielher's solar telescope.	Hobby Astronomer Oliver Stiehler captures Transit of Venus in front of the sun using hydrogen telescope and AVT Manta G-125B monochrome camera. Video courtesy of AVT and Oliver Stiehler

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