On June 8th, 2004 a rare astronomical event kept amateur astronomers busy - at least those who were located in the eastern hemisphere. For a few hours the sun, Venus and earth were so perfectly aligned that from our perspective our neighbour planet slowly moved across the sun. This is an event that happens usually every 113 or 130 years in pairs which are 8 years apart, so the previous ones were in 1874 and 1882, the next ones are to be in 2012, 2117 and 2125. What was unique for this specific transit, was the outstanding visibility for central Europe, combined with fine weather forecasts.

Needless to say that this was a "must-see" for me, so I took a day off and had my equipment placed on a hill called "Laaer Berg" in the southern part of Vienna. As air transparency mattered less than steady air, I didn't bother to make a long trip to some hill outside the city. I experienced that the atmosphere is often more turbulent in mountain areas, specially in summer.

Unfortunately clouds came and went, but nevertheless I was happy to capture at least parts of the event with two setups I used. First, I took pictures with my 8" SCT to document the transit in detail. In the final phase of the transit I took a fast motion sequence with my video camera to which a 2x teleconverter was attached.