Watching Venus transit the sun

Once in his lifetime
London, ON
June 2012

Remember when we all went gaga over the whole Venus-transits-the-Sun thing? I wrote about it here, and even managed to get a mostly non-sucky picture in the process.

Well, here's the thing: the sun shot wasn't my favorite one of the bunch. This one is. As I often do when I'm out with the kids and we're watching a certain thing - doesn't matter what that thing is, really - I like to fall back and watch them do the watching. It's a meta-type photo kind of deal, but I've come to appreciate how much richer a given experience can be when I look at it through their lens instead of one built by Nikon.

I had shared a ton of geeky background information on this once-in-a-lifetime event as we stood, awestruck, at the meeting point of a dead-end road and a soon-to-be-developed field. I had tried to explain to Noah why this was significant, and why it was worth dropping whatever we were doing and zipping over to this viewing spot. But it was still hard to tell just how he was processing the experience, how the memory was settling in his head in much the same way other images made their way into my own childhood so many years ago.

This picture begins to answer those questions for me. Somehow, I know he'll carry this forward, creating his own pictures in his mind's eye to keep the moment fresh and vital no matter how old he gets.

Your turn: Do you remember something notable from your own childhood? What made it worth remembering in the first place?

One more thing: This photo wraps up our week-long exploration of Thematic's "from behind" theme. If you'd like to submit your own last-minute shot, click here. Otherwise, I hope you'll pop back in later tonight, as our next theme, parallelism, goes live at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.