These are photos of the 2004-06-08 Venus transit. I was about a mile south of Urbana, IL, out in the country. It was rough getting up at 4AM, but I'm glad I did. The pictures came out surprisingly well. I was shocked to find that the zoom lens I was using went all the way to f/38. It came in handy. The last couple of pictures (non-filtered) are at the smallest aperature and 1/4000 second. The filter I used for some of them and for when I wanted to look directly at the transit is a 6"x4" piece of welder's glass. There's some rating scale for the glass. I don't remember what it is, but this is supposedly a safe level. I met a fellow stargazer out there. He had a pretty good setup to view the transit reflected off a piece of paper behind a lens from a refracting telescope. It turned out to be difficult to get the paper to stay in the focal plan of the lens. If we could have gotten that working, it might have worked even better to just do that and use a macro lens. I'll remember that for next time...