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Saturday 7 January 2017

Mercury Solar Transit

So it has been ages since I posted on here, mainly because I hadn't actually had my gear out much since the last post. However, I did use it during the Mercury Transit and I have no excuse for not posting about that!

I am therefore going to try and cover it now, many months later!

Firstly, I was amazed that on the morning of the 9th May 2016 I got up and found the Scottish sky was clear and the sun was shining. This was great news to me as I had already spent the day before designing a Solar Filter to fit over my Skywatcher 80ED in the hope of catching the Transit of Mercury. If I had missed it then it would have been 2019 before I got another chance.

Anyway I took some shots with my Canon 700d and with my QHY5II-L Planetary camera. First up however, I may as well show you a cropped image of Mercury's first moment of transit.


I actually took quite a lot of images over the first hour and even managed to make a short film out of it!


It is a shame the image is so small as it isn't always that easy to spot the tiny wee planet crossing the solar disc but that I suppose is part of the charm. To make it easier to spot, I actually took a picture and annotated it which is something I don't normally do, but some of my non astro friends on facebook needed it pointed out to them!


One of my favourite images though was the one I took with my planetary webcam, mainly because I got a bigger image of Mercury, but also because it really brought out the sunspots as well.


It was a thoroughly enjoyable day for me and of course I couldn't do some solar imaging without a little solar projection which was useful when my kids came home from school!


It isn't easy to see but Mercury is there a tiny dark spot. What I don't have pictures of however is the point at which I left a cap on my eyepiece and took the filter off which resulted in a little bit of smoking, nor am I am showing you images of the terrible sun burn I got!

Either way it was a fun afternoon and I am glad the Scottish weather actually let me see it!


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