The Astronomy Club had set up their telescopes on the terrace in front of the Quad when I arrived at work. It was overcast and unlikely they'd get a chance to see the transit of Venus in their - or even their children's - lifetimes. But when I came out at lunch, it had turned into a blustery cloudy marine kind of day, the sun flashing out in patches for minutes at a time. So I lined up with the other quietly excited introverts to take my turn at one of the telescopes. And bending down and looking through the eye-piece I saw a small black dot on a smoky yellow background - the telescope had magnified the edges of the sun out of view. There was another viewer nearby, like a camera oscura, that threw an image of a white sun with a small black dot on a round screen. It looked like the dot ball in billiards and the difference in scale between the small black dot and the large white disc was interesting.
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| Quietly excited introverts. |
Someone was giving out sun-viewing glasses, like cardboard 3D specs but with thick brown plastic instead of the blue and red lenses. I put a pair on and looked at the sun - and I was looking at the Sun, our star, up in the sky - but in front of it was that tiny dark circle that was Venus - and it was like the Sun, and Venus, and Earth, were all beads on a string, and I could feel myself looking across
space, across all that distance to a
planet, and a star,
seeing so far. I felt as big as that space, and I was amazed! and I was elated.
The Astronomy Club had set up their telescopes on the terrace in front of the Quad when I arrived at work. It was overcast and unlikely they'd get a chance to see the transit of Venus in their - or even their children's - lifetimes. But when I came out at lunch, it had turned into a blustery cloudy marine kind of day, the sun flashing out in patches for minutes at a time. So I lined up with the other quietly excited introverts to take my turn at one of the telescopes. And bending down and looking through the eye-piece I saw a small black dot on a smoky yellow background - the telescope had magnified the edges of the sun out of view. There was another viewer nearby, like a camera oscura, that threw an image of a white sun with a small black dot on a round screen. It looked like the dot ball in billiards and the difference in scale between the small black dot and the large white disc was interesting.
