Transit of Venus 2012, Belgrade, Serbia, 06:50 UTC

It was still dark outside (as it should be at 3 am) when I loaded my old car with all the equipment I had ‎at home – telescope, digital camera, video camera, coffee, and went to pick up my friend and ‎colleague Igor. We were in a hurry to set everything up at the roof of the Institute of Physics before ‎the sunrise and arrival of the rest of our crew. Hour and a half later, we knew that the Sun came up at ‎‎4:53 am in this part of the world, crossroad of Central and Southeast Europe. We knew but we couldn’t ‎prove it empirically (at least not by using our sight). In accordance with Murphy ’s Law, the clouds were ‎all over the sky. The time passed, but those clouds didn’t. We were just in the middle of developing ‎the strategy under running title “How to live up to the year of 2117”, when we saw the disk peeking ‎behind the clouds. And it was around 06:45 am, time also known as “10 more minutes of transit”. We ‎didn’t panic (although some of us got stuck in the window frame while running out on the roof), we ‎were acting cool and fast, and in the first minute we realized that the telescope was of no use. Calmly ‎‎(although some of us started to reconsider the God’s existence) we remembered the video camera ‎‎(Sony DCR-SX63, with critically important feature - 60x optical zoom). The clouds (and occasionally the ‎‎5$ sunglasses) served as a solar filter, and the last minutes of transit were captured. Just in case you ‎wonder about the weather on the rest of the June 6th 2012 in Belgrade: clear sky, 27C°, gently breezed ‎‎– wonderful, sunny, summer day.‎