Up early (0900) yesterday with the intention of witnessing Venus cutting down available light from the sun by about 0.0001%.
I am old enough to understand that you never look at the sun directly, so I looked at the sun directly just to check where it was, and spent the next ten minutes with impaired vision. I am also old enough to understand that you don’t try and undertake complex tasks such as foaming milk with steam when your vision is impaired. So the cappuccino was not up to the usual standard and I had a scalded finger.
Vision returned, I hunted down an old pair of binoculars and pointed them at the approximate location of the sun and stuck a piece of white paper at the other end; all very Blue Peter. Sure enough, with a bit of twiddling, I could make out an outline of a round thing; but there was no indication of a smaller round thing sneaking across its surface.
Waste of time; so I dragged out the heavy gear and made this: