Living in the past IIX (or is it VIII?)

You know, why use four digits when you can use three? I never understood that convention for Roman numerals, but then again, Arabic doesn’t make any sense either – they’re just what we’ve been taught.

Anyway, another from 2012, and it wouldn’t be hard to figure out the exact date.

2012 transit of Venus in front of the sun, naturally filtered by clouds
There was a lot of media attention regarding the transit of Venus in front of the sun, but I’d made no plans to capture this; it was occurring in late afternoon and I had no solar filter for the camera, and wasn’t about to spend the money on something that I’d use once (well, it would have been twice at least, since I would have put it to work again with the total solar eclipse five years later.) But then as the day wore on, I saw the clouds getting thicker and occasionally obscuring the sun just enough, and set up and waited for the right conditions. I was shooting at the limits of the camera – minimum aperture and ISO, maximum shutter speed – but it worked, and I captured something that I’d missed eight years earlier and wouldn’t be seen again for 105 years, and I’ll probably miss that one too.

11 days later, Venus was already noticeably different.