Does this image by Dave McCarter hint at one of the black drop forms, namely a thread connecting Venus to the solar limb? See if you can discern it at lower left. Image courtesy of Dave McCarter (©Dave McCarter)

Dave McCarter took this image through an ETX90 with an objective filter. It's a fine image, and even more impressive when one realizes his OTA was buffeted by high winds at the time! Image courtesy of Dave McCarter (©Dave McCarter)

The Toronto Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory building from which the 1882 transit of Venus (ToV) was supposed to be observed survives, although it was moved to its present location subsequent to 1882. The observatory tower was built to house the high quality 152mm O.G. Thomas Cooke refractor commissioned for the ToV. The telescope also survives, and is in the collections of the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa.

Photograph by R.A. Rosenfeld.

This pillar, erected to carry an astrometrical instrument called a meridian transit, is the only original surviving architectural feature on the site of the Toronto Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory, the nerve centre of the Dominion's 1882 transit of Venus campaign, and a place from which the ToV was not observed due to uncooperative weather.

Photograph by R.A. Rosenfeld.

The Toronto Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory was the nerve centre for the Dominion's Transit of Venus (ToV) campaign in 1882. That campaign was designed, organized, and directed by Charles Carpmael, the director of the observatory, superintendent of the Dominion's Meteorological Office, and first President of the reconstituted RASC from 1890-1894. The campaign involved thirteen observing stations, distributed from Charlottetown to Winnipeg.

This retrospective map in 18th-century style shows the general location of William Wales' and Joseph Dymond's transit of Venus station, where they wintered over in 1768-1769. Image courtesy of Specula astronomica minima (©Specula astronomica minima).

This is a fine posthumous copper-plate portrait of the Rev'd Dr. Edmund Halley (1656-1742), the second Astronomer Royal (1720-1742). Halley is in many ways the father of the Transit of Venus enterprise, for he is the one who realized the practicality of using ToV observations to determine the Sun-Earth distance (the Astronomical Unit, AU), who devised a method for doing so (the so-called Halleyan Method), and who encouraged the mounting of a 1769 ToV campaign to that end, although he himself was unlikely to live to take part, or see the results.

Professor John Winthrop, Harvard College’s Hollisian Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy, successfully observed the 1761 transit from Venus Hill, now thought to be somewhere in the vicinity of St. John's (Kenmount Hill?).

Thomas Wright published his successful transit observations, complete with a full disc image of the course of Venus on the Sun, and sunspots, in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, vol. 59 (1769), 273-280. This is a recreation of an 18th-century manuscript copy of his report. Image courtesy of Specula astronomica minima (©Specula astronomica minima).

In 2004 the RASC Calgary Centre organized a transit expedition, during which Mike Mah was able to take both this image of Venus transiting, and that of the sculpture of Hatshepsut to create a very effective composite picture. Image courtesy of Mike Mah. Image courtesy Mike Mah and the RASC Calgary Centre (©Mike Mah)