NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Edwards
Date: 2004 Jun 8, 10:43 -0400
Aside from sailing and celestial navigation my other passion is astronomy. My homemade 8" newtonian reflector, which I constructed in 1963 with an Edmund Optics kit, worked wonderfully, projecting the image of the sun onto a piece of white paper. The image was roughly 10 inches across allowing many people to view at once. Venus appeared as a black dot about the size of a pea. I live in North Florida and participated in this viewing event along with several other members of the Alachua Astronomy Club in Gainesville. We started viewing at dawn, 06:28 EDT and saw almost an hour of the transit before it ended. We had the viewing on the top floor of a parking garage on the campus of the University of Florida.
David J. Edwards Senior Computer Programmer / Analyst
Information Systems dedward@ufl.edu
University of Florida
POB 113275 (352) 392-1285
Gainesville, FL 32611-3275
"When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson