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Mercury transit 9th May 2016

Posted: Tue May 10, 2016 3:20 pm
by Conn Buckley
Did any SAC club members get to see the transit? Judging by the reports on IFAS it seems that the weather ruined it for quite a few people with the Northern end of the country being a bit clearer.
I had my ETX 90 (with Thousand Oaks Solar filter) all set up plus my camera and made my day free to avail of any opportunity to observe the transit.

Each time a break in the cloud looked like arriving it simply vanished.Then about 2:30 p.m. the cloud weakened and I got approximately one minute to manually point the scope at the Sun. By the time I got the focus right and a jacket thrown over my head to keep out unwanted light I got about 15 seconds of a clear view. All the build up to this event stressed how small Mercury's disk would appear as it transited the Sun( about 1/160th of the Sun's diameter) so I was pleasantly surprised to find it looked a little bigger than I expected but very strikingly black and crisp against the orange colour of the Sun.

Given this transit was due to last circa 8 hours I thought that I would be bored watching it all day and would end up with hundreds of photos trying to decide which photo would best represent the memory of this historic transit. What I did get was a very precious and unforgettable 15 second sharp glimpse of humble and tiny Mercury passing in front of the majesty of our Sun. As with all things astronomical an appreciation of what you are observing means everything. RTE news ran a piece on the observing scopes in Trinity College and one member of the public summed it up when she said 'it just shows how small we are'.

Re: Mercury transit 9th June 2016

Posted: Tue May 10, 2016 7:50 pm
by Dave Lillis
Hi Conn,
Glad to see you got a glimpse of it. Early on Monday morning I had a look at satellite images and saw there wasn't a hope of good viewing here, tbh I'm surprised you got to see anything. I saw the massive clearance north of the Mourne mountains.
I decided I'm out of here and contacted Michael O'Connell, I collected him at Monasterevin and headed up to Belfast, we managed to see about 2/3rds of the transit, even got a little sunburn, well worth the trip, reminded me of a mini Venus transit and like you I was surprised at how easy it was to see, i thought it would be smaller.

I wasn't going to travel but when I saw it was a dead certainty that it was clear in Belfast, that was it, I was gone.
It was why I didn't tie myself down to attending a group observing site, like we did for the almost total eclipse last year, a 1 hour drive then and we would have seen the eclipse as opposed to seeing zippo like we did.....

Re: Mercury transit 9th June 2016

Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 11:53 pm
by Dave Lillis
Hi ,
I got around to processing the images, and this is the result

Image

We missed the start of the transit and intermittent light clouds prevented a evenly spaced sequence, still though, I'm happy enough with it.

Re: Mercury transit 9th May 2016

Posted: Mon May 16, 2016 8:44 pm
by Conn Buckley
Dave, terrific image that certainly captures the occasion …. your planning and travel initiative sure paid off …. well done. Conn

Re: Mercury transit 9th May 2016

Posted: Sun May 22, 2016 7:19 am
by John O'Mahony
Hi Conn

I took my 90mm Mak Cass and Seymour Solar filter with me that morning on my way to work in Ballina, Co Mayo. It was clouded out the whole morning. What I wanted to do was set up at lunchtime in the car park and do a bit of public outreach with the people at work. As luck would have it, it cleared exactly at 1pm until 2pm where I was able to show the event to about 20 people. A few people later commented that they missed it and would like to have a go observing it at 5pm on the way home-weather permitting. Again, as luck would have it, it cleared up at 5pm for another hour where I had another group of people out and managed to get a few photos this time.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/7703127@N ... ed-public/

An enjoyable day. It reminded me a bit of the last Venus transit where myself and a colleague set up on a balcony at work at lunchtime and managed to show about 150 people the event through the occasional breaks in the clouds that appeared despite the heavy rain. People had to queue up and wait for a sucker hole in the clouds to appear and then grab a quick 10 second look. That was a fun day.

Re: Mercury transit 9th May 2016

Posted: Mon May 23, 2016 9:53 pm
by Conn Buckley
Hi John, I am delighted that you had such success and even better that you managed to share the experience with so many other colleagues. Your image nicely captures the event..... well done. Conn

Re: Mercury transit 9th May 2016

Posted: Tue May 24, 2016 12:34 am
by Dave Lillis
Thats great John, glad you got to se it.

One interesting thing to note with this transit was that Mercury was practically at aphelion, as far from the Sun as it can get, in other words, its as near to us as it gets, so its as big as possible, the next transit in 2019 is at perihelion, making it alot smaller through the scope, so that transit will be alot shorter in time also.

Re: Mercury transit 9th May 2016

Posted: Thu May 26, 2016 7:56 pm
by Gordon Lalor
I had a similar experience to you Conn.
Took a day off and had the scope setup in the back yard to catch as much of the transit as possible.
In the end there was about 15 minutes of clear skies about 3pm and by the time i found the sun, i had roughly a minute of viewing.
No pictures to show for it, but as others have mentioned Mercury was surprisingly "big" after all the talk of how small it was going to be.

It must have made an impression on you Dave, if you are already making plans for the 2019 transit :D

Re: Mercury transit 9th May 2016

Posted: Thu May 26, 2016 10:18 pm
by Dave Lillis
Plans are afoot Gordon, we have plenty of time to organise it. :D