Venus

I made an elementary pin-hole camera using my binoculars and two pieces of card. This enabled me to watch the transition of Venus safely yesterday. It was fascinating. Whilst, on the face of it, watching a dot the size of a pin-head move across a disc the size of a small cup appears quite dull I was struck by the sheer size of the real things.

Venus is roughly the same size as Earth and it was a further 65 million miles or so from Venus to the Sun at the time of the transition. I now realise, I think for the first time ever, quite how big our Sun is. As Sting puts it, ‘How fragile we are.’