Mercury transit 9th May 2016
Posted: Tue May 10, 2016 3:20 pm
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'.
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'.