Mercury Transit

Monday May 9th 2016

From the Midlands northwards, clear skies with warm sunshine and occasional high cloud allowed excellent

views of the transit of Mercury.

Click for larger photo

Keith Middleton

11.24UT 12.14UT

13.45UT 15.49UT

15.54UT 16.05UT

80 mm guide scope mounted on the CGEM 11 either with a DSLR or web cam. The webcam videos proved

very hard to process due to the high cloud causing problems with stacking on Registax on a very low contrast

surface.

Gary Poyner

11.41 UT 11.47UT

Taken with an LG mobile phone hand held through a 14mm Radian eyepiece on a 22cm f6.2 dobsonian stopped down to 10cm and 30 year old Solar Screen filter.

Andrew Dumbleton

11.23UT 11.23UT

12.38UT 15.26UT

Andrew comments...

"A few images from me of the transit, most resized to 800 x 600. Carole and I originally turned up at Castle

Bromwich Hall Gardens, but were told we were too early and invited back later. However, the tea shop would

have been closed and viewing beginning after the transit would have started, so we relocated to Kingsbury Water

Park. As foot traffic was so low and those that were walking around the park were not curious enough to come

and take a closer look, we relocated to back home and I set up on the driveway. From here I broadcast via Night

Skies Network and Video Astronomy Live sites simultaneously for a few hours and then shut down at teatime to

watch the end of the event via the SLOOH live show.

In both locations I was using my PST and Samsung SCB2000 video camera for the H-alpha views, and the

Sunspotter telescope for the white light view. At Kingsbury I used a colourised card for projection and at home

a plain white card."

Simon Pinnick

AVI taken at 14.12 UT with dmk & pst processed with registax 5.1 and gimp

AVI taken at 17.12 UT with dmk & pst processed with registax 5.1 and gimp

Roger Salt

Roger didn't secure any images, but he reports "No pictures from me I'm afraid, but I thought you would like to know that I

spent much of last Monday afternoon tracking the transit and causing general chaos in my road as most of the neighbours

stopped what they were doing and came over to view the refracted image of Mercury. Amazing that people did not know it

was happening or how rare the event was".

Dawn Passant

Taken with Nikon Lz20 Zoom camera. Using Baader Solar Film. 15h 50m UT

2003

Click for larger photo.

Ian Lainchbury. 8 inch Newtonian with Phillips ToUCam Pro web-cam. Baader filter

8 inch Newtonian. Fuji digital camera. Baader filter

Rob Januszewski - 90mm Mak-Cas. Baader filter & Fuji Finepix

G. Poyner. 50mm f22 reflector. Baader filter. Fuji Finepix hand held at eyepiece.

G. Poyner: 50mm f22 reflector. Baader filter. Fuji Finepix hand held at eyepiece.

Keith Middleton. Fuji Finepix S602. Projected image from 80mm OG