Activity from IAO Hanle
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As you are aware, lifetime opportunity and rarest celestial event of Transit of Venus will occur on 6th June 2012. To facilitate the event, VigyanPrasar (VP), New Delhi and Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru (autonomous institutions of Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India) in association with Amateur Astronomers Association Delhi (AAAD) are going to set up a webcast station near Himalayan Chandra Telescope (HCT) which is presently world’s highest ground based optical observatory. The station is located with latitude of 32° 46’ 46”, longitude of 78° 57’ 51” and altitude: 4486 meter above mean sea level.
Since the month of June is a time of arrival of monsoon in most part of the country, the site selection is made to facilitate the webcast to interested science communication institute/organizations/centers and amateur groups through their websites. At Hanle, VP-IIA-AAAD will make an arrangement to provide the High Definition live web cast from a small telescope placed near HCT. The data from Hanle will be transferred through a dedicated satellite link to Hoskote (near Bangalore) where satellite control system is placed. From there the data will be processed and converted from analog to digital and will finally be posted on the webcast server placed at NASA. The entire process will not take more than 4 or 5 seconds including the transfer and uplinking.
The stream is multi-bit rate compliant and hence it will adjust the streaming speed and resolution based on your internet download speed automatically. This will make sure, even if you are on a slow internet speed you can still enjoy our webcast.
We will also record the entire footage and make it available to all our viewers through our websites after the event is over. You can get the recorded feed from the following websites.
Webcast from Hanle
| Location: | Mt. Saraswati, Indian Astronomical Observatory, Hanle |
| Latitude: | 32° 46' 46" N |
| Longitude: | 78° 57' 51" E |
| Altitude: | 4486 meter |
Circumstances of Transit of Venus:
| Event | Time(IST) | Alt. | Az. | P.A. |
| Exterior Ingress | 03:38 | -16°, below horizon |
| Interior Ingress | 03:56 | -13°, below horizon |
| Sunrise | 05:08 | 3° | 62° |
| Closest Approach | 07:02 | 22° | 76° | 346° |
| Interior Egress | 10:04 | 60° | 102° | 292° |
| Exterior Egress | 10:22 | 64° | 106° | 290° |
| Duration | 5h 14m |
| Solar Semi-dia. | 15’ 45.7” |
Venus Semi-dia. | 0’ 28.9 |
Details of the station:
| Mount: | Atlas German Equatorial Mount |
| Camera and Lens: | Canon 550D (Digital SLR camera) with Canon 300mm Lens. |