Below is an animation of the second contact of the Venus transit. I missed the first contact through the webcam because I wasn't exactly sure where on the sun's disk Venus would appear. I did however witness it visually.

2nd Contact 05:58:40 UT

This image was taken a short while after second contact as Venus moved further onto the sun's disk. Through the telescope the sight looked positively odd.
I was using my home-made 6" F6 telescope at Newtonian focus to image. It was extremely difficult to get the light levels right with the Laptop in the boot of the car.

Another view shot with the digital camera through the eyepiece.

This was a 26mm eyepiece.
The telescope is a 150mm diameter mirror with a focal ratio of F6. This gives a focal length of 150mm x 6 = 900mm.
The magnification is the Telescopes focal length ÷ Eyepiece focal length.

900mm ÷ 26mm = 34.6 magnification.

A quick swap of filter.
I thought I'd try a UV filter to see what the Transit looked like. I didn't expect much change. The only obvious difference is the colour of the sun's disk. There is a faint ring of light just within the disk of Venus, but this could just be a processing artifact. There is also a bright ring around the planet which may be a processing artifact, but was evident in the original video frames.

This is my not-so-good attempt at a full disk mosaic. It gives an idea of the view through the telescope eyepiece. Unfortunately I managed to over expose the centre of the sun, in most of my images for this composite. Some of the detail is therefore missing in the centre of the sun. You can also make out the lines where the different bits of the image have been joined together.

6" F6 Newtonian. 0.6 focal reducer.
The final mosaiced image was reduced by 50%.

I used a combination of a Red filter, and a Baader UV filter to capture this image. It doesn't seem to have as noticeable a bright ring around the planet as some of the other images display, despite a similar amount of image processing.

This time I used a home-made IR filter to image the transit. For some reason the ToUcam decided to colour it blue. I quite like this image. I also used a 0.6 focal reducer to get a wider field of view.

This was a shot through my cheap 80mm F5 refractor. A little less well focussed but a bit more of the sun and those sun spots.

The show is nearly over now. By this time I had moved to the sea front at Weymouth. It took longer than I thought it would to get to the beach, and install my family on the beach. I was however just in time to set up the telescope behind my car and witness the 3rd and 4th contact as Venus left the sun's disk. The timings were:
3rd contact: 11:22:28 UT.     4th contact: 11:42:12 UT.

I even had time to show a few people the spectacle before I swapped the eyepiece for the webcam. About 10 minutes after it was all over, cloud covered the sun's disk. Phew - what an amazing morning.

After I got home and had processed my images, I saw some amazing images of Venus on the internet, showing the sun light shining through the planets atmosphere, as Venus left the suns disk. Some of these were breath-taking and very clear. I was disappointed that the settings I had used wouldn't bring out this detail. However, not to be out done, I tried to heavily process what I had got and was rewarded with the image opposite. It is very 'noisy' but clearly shows the sun shining through the atmosphere of the planet. Oddly, the more you stare at it the more you wonder if it isn't just noise in the picture. Turn away and look back and it's obvious again what is causing the arc of light.