Transit of Venus 2012

Hi everyone! I wanted to do a blog post about my experience of the Transit of Venus. It happened June 5, 2012. I was very excited about this because this was the first time in years that Los Angeles would have been able to see Venus move across the sun. The last time it was seen from LA was in 1882!! I love astronomy so this type of stuff gets me super excited. I begged my boyfriend to take me and he was up for it. :D We went to the Griffith Observatory.  We knew it would be crowded and didn't want to take any chances, so we planned ahead and decided to park at the bottom and hike it up to the Obeservatory. It took us around 25 minutes to get up there but it was worth it. It was  crowded but we got there in time and were able to see everything we wanted.

 Many people volunteered to have their telescopes there so it was really nice to see it in person and with our own eyes rather than seeing it on a screen like the Observatory had inside the building. Here is a picture I took of one of the telescopes. The big white circle is the sun and I don't know if you can see it well (sorry!) on the right side that tiny dot is Venus! There was a very cool telescope we saw that showed the sun in its true colors and we were able to see the sun flares, that one was really cool!

 We saw a lot of people wearing some glasses that looked like old 3-D glasses ( remember having those with red and blue lenses, those were fun to have lol) We asked where they got them and they said the gift shop. After seeing all the telescopes we went there to get some, as a souvenir and also they said we can use them for solar eclipses as well. We were able to use them and they did work but it wasn't as good as the telescopes, still neat to have for the future solar eclipses though.

As we were at the checkout I saw a box of these pins and I knew I had to have one! and for 69 cents who can resist haha My boyfriend bought us both each of one. I was excited I wore mine all day lol

8:02 was the last time to see the Transit of Venus until 2117! It was indeed a fun day and we stayed there until the transit was over. We would've stayed longer but we forgot we hiked it up there and we had to go back down early before it got too dark for us. I will never forget the day and I'm glad I was able to experience something that doesn't come too often. Especially being able to experience it with someone who understands my excitement about astronomy and everything outside our world that not too many people think about or aren't passionate about Astronomy as much as I am. The next program Griffith has is a Public Star Party, it's a chance for everyone to see the sun, moon, and visible planets, and to try various telescopes. I want to go to that so bad but I will be out of town that week, but I'l be writing a post about that soon ;)