My daughter was assaulting me with questions--"How are we going to see it? Why can't we look at the sun? But I thought you said we can't look at the sun? Why is this such a big deal daddy?" I decided to buy myself some time so I asked her to go to her room and calculate how old she will be the next time Venus transits the sun a little over 105 years from now.
Unfortunately she lost all of her math ability somewhere between the bus stop and her bedroom sometime within the last week and so I had to reteach her how to add several multi-digit numbers. Although I didn't end up buying myself any time, evidently I did make an impression on her. "I will be 112 years old!" I asked her if she knew anyone that old. Her grandparents and her great-grandma will be happy to know that none of their names came up. She couldn't think of anyone or anything that old. My wife and I affirmed that neither could we. So I tried again, "So why is this such a big deal?" And my daughter said that more than likely we wouldn't be alive anymore and that perhaps her kids or grand-kids would see it. Yeah!
In the picture above my daughter is pointing at the small shadow of Venus. This was at about 7:30 pm EST. Mostly we had overcast skies but we had about a dozen instances where the clouds broke. We could even discern at least five sunspots. My daughter and I went to school earlier in the day to get a couple stands, variable angle clamps, and rods to support a regular pair of binoculars. I affixed the binoculars to the support rods with some rubber bands and left the lens covers on one side of the binoculars so that the light only went through one side. It worked perfectly.