As I am sure many of you know that yesterday or last night depending on where you are in the world a very special event took place. This special event was the once in a lifetime occurrence of the Transit of Venus. This is when Venus passes in between the earth and the sun and is represented by a small black dot on the sun. Due to our 24 hr sunlight this is the perfect place to be for the event, the only issue with this came to be the weather. As midnight approached it became cloudier and the blue skies of the day were no where to be seen. Our only hope was to then catch the tail end of the event which ended at about 6:30am so I set my alarm for 6 to hopefully wake up to blue skies. Unfortunately I woke up to more clouds, even so I had to take a picture to know that somewhere in this picture Venus is hiding.

So as disappointing as this event was I can at least say I have a picture of Venus....It may be hard to see but if you look really closely it is there somewhere. Then of course by 7am we had beautiful blue skies again.
On a different note I have found something up here that I was very surprised to see. The sign below is a sign that I walk by everyday and luckily the other day I looked a little closer at it and found something amazing.

The thing that made me look closer was the Ski The East sticker which is a popular slogan on the east coast of the US. Then as read the other stickers I read the one on the left which read, "Ski Like a Local". Which is very appropriate for up here, the best part of this sticker is that I had seen it before. The bottom of the sticker reads, "Outdoor Gear Exchange, Burlington, VT"! I couldn't believe my eyes, someone from VT had been here before and it made me feel great. Of course the more I thought about it the more I realized of course someone from VT had been here before, because well if I could think of anyone crazy enough to come ski out here it would be a Vermonter. This made me very proud and I love walking by this sign now.

Finally at work I have been working on preforming some image processing in order to design certain parts for my calibration setup. Then for fun I applied some of my code to pictures of Longyearbyen and was able to get some interesting pictures.

A final note that I just remembered is that if your interested in seeing what Longyearbyen looks like at any point the UNIS has rotating camera on its roof that can be viewed on the web. Here is the link if any of you are interested.
http://longyearbyen.livecam360.com/flash/main.php