Venus Occultation

This is not book related, but it's still very cool.  One of my other hobbies is amateur astronomy.  On Saturday, 11 September 2010, South Africa was in an ideal location to view a rare occultation of Venus by the Moon.

 Occultation is just a fancy way of saying that one celestial objects seems to disappear behind another.  In this case it was Venus that disappeared behind the Moon.  One added benefit was that it made it extremely easy to see Venus during the daytime as a bright dot of light.

I managed to capture a few images, but since this happened very close to the Sun conditions weren't ideal resulting in images that seems a bit washed out.

Using some carefully selected still images and compiling them into a video gives a good idea of what it looked liked.  So if you missed it here's your chance to see it for yourself!