Venus on Parade

For those of us who love the sky and all its inhabitants, this has been a good year in Northern California. We had the annular eclipse a couple of weeks ago, and then yesterday we were able to see Venus' transit of the sun.

How cool is that? And if you missed it, don't worry. We'll get another one in about 100 years.

P loves this sort of thing, so he headed over to Napa Valley College, where a group of his astro-buddies had set up telescopes for the occasion. And he even took a photo of the show with his Blackberry, through a telescope eyepiece at the college.

How cool is that?

That bigger black dot on the Sun's surface is Venus--and the smaller dots are sunspots...