Venus Passing The Sun
6th June 2012
Suddenly I woke up. Sunlight was
hitting the bedroom window. I had almost forgotten. I certainly forgot to set
the alarm. I expected rain and a grey start, instead by the time I’d wiped my eyes I could just see some blue sky
peeping through fast moving low cloud. I ran down stairs, grabbed the tripod,
clipped on the camera, ran to the front door and then realized I had nothing on
! Bugger, so ran back up stairs, grabbed some cloths, back down again and
quickly shot out of the front door, still half dressed. I apologies to any birds
that may have seen my dress code ! Then above the roof tops, watching the clock
tick by, a large block of dark grey cloud made its way across the sky just in
time to block out any sign of the sun. Well, it is Great Britain and summer time after
all. The sun crept above the roof tops of Cheltenham
behind low cloud. No need for fancy filters then. I got some pictures of light
creeping around the clouds. Almost giving up any thoughts of seeing this
amazing event, then I realized I might need sunglasses if the sun did show, so
ran back in doors quickly to get some. By now it was just coming up to 5.37am
and with a sudden dazzling burst of light that lasted for what seemed like a
blink in time, I fired off several shots, more in hope than anything. Still
dazed from broken sleep and that sudden if not very short burst of sunlight, I
went back in doors to see the sun was still trying to break through the clouds
properly. I decided to go back to bed until the next wake up call, which was
for the Severn Bore’s arrival later that morning, when I would make my way over
to Maisemore Weir. When I got up, I downloaded my Sun pictures and
to my delight I actually managed to get 3 frames of Venus passing the face of
the sun. Each shot was taken at 5000th of a second, so it really was
a close call as the next frame in sequence was into cloud cover again, phew.
Andy Sharpe
