Transit of Venus II

It's cloudy at my location so no direct observing of the transit of Venus.  That sort of stinks, but there's not much I can do about the clouds.  Instead, I'm doing the next best thing.  Watching the live streams from various telescopes across the U.S.  Here's a link to NASA's list of live streams:

http://sunearthday.gsfc.nasa.gov/webcasts/mtwilson/

The link directs you to the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California, but there's a map below the stream for you to choose other locations.  I showed my oldest daughter the video at the start of transit, but this coincided with the start of dinner, so she was more interested in dinner.  :-)  I showed her again after dinner and her attention span was a little bit longer.  She picked out the sun and sunspots since these she saw directly through a telescope a couple of weeks ago.  She thought it was neat that the dark circle was Venus, but then she quickly moved on to more interesting things for a 5 year old.  I can't really blame her.  The video doesn't change over the course of a minute or two so once you look at it, there's not much else to see :-)  The image itself isn't all that exciting, but the rarity of the event makes it exciting.  The next transit is 105 years from now in 2117!!!

If you don't get the chance to directly observe the transit or see it on the live stream you can google it for pictures.  There will be thousands.  Here's one example:

The big yellow circle is obviously the Sun.  The dark circle in the upper right is Venus.  The other, smaller, less dark spots are sunspots.