So I did see the transit yesterday. Had been planning on dragging the kids out to the scopes at the science and technology museum, but on stepping outside toward doing so, saw a neighbour had set up his refractor—kitted out with a solar filter—on the sidewalk.

So I strolled over, asked nicely, and I and the kids saw it there, instead, which was much more convenient.

It’s very neat seeing the disk of Venus that way. It’s funny how much more it seems to make it a real object—and never mind that it’s visible as a slightly more than starlike point quite regularly, and never mind there’s countless photos available now from various ground and space telescopes and from robotic craft that even went so far as to land on the thing. Seeing with your own eyes through the eyepiece that actually-not-so-little very round disk in front of the substantially larger disk of the sun, Venus suddenly seems that much more solid and that much nearer—a real thing, a real place. A planetary neighbour swinging by real close and showing up in stark silhouette.

We weren’t the only ones nearby stopping to look, either. Walking later over to the pharmacy, I met a guy who was using his binoculars to project the image onto a sheet of paper—which he reported was also working fairly well.