Transits and eclipses

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Mercury transit. Flat batteries caught me out. The brand new, cheaper, rechargeable batteries I had just bought wouldn't hold a charge! Never trust a battery you haven't recharged at least once before the big event. Mercury is the tiny rather fuzzy speck at 8 o'clock at ~2/3 radius away from the centre of the Sun. I only managed a few images and then the camera went dead with no more batteries in the house! I think there is too much penumbra in the small sun spot rather than it being Mercury out of focus.

But Note: My computer hard drive crashed recently and lots of my images were lost. I'm wondering whether that speck isn't just a small sunspot. I shall have to dig deeper because the image date and transit date don't match by about a month. If that is mercury it isn't very sharp even by my standards.

Just to add to the confusion I recently found the image above matched the transit date of May 7 2003. High cloud obviously added to the misery of running out of batteries! The Mercury suspect is arrowed. I used Photofiltre to try and sharpen up the image a little.

Venus transit of 6 June 2004 captured with my old Sony P71 digital camera simply hand held to the eyepiece of my 6" F8 Celestron refractor. Full aperture Baader Solarfilm filter. Probably using my 15mm Meade 4000 Super Plossl eyepiece. Notice the lack of sun spots and suggestion of limb darkening. The strong pink colour suggests that this event was before I'd bought the Baader Fringe Killer minus violet filter. Which tends to whiten the pink solar image of the Solarfilm alone by adding a slight yellow tint. Not a bad result which even stands up to enlargement.

31 May 2003 at 4:20 in the morning found me standing on an ancient hill waiting for the clouds to clear. I had dragged my 90mm f:11 Vixen refractor, with video tripod and pan and tilt head up the steep and muddy path, past the standing stones from the car park far below. A couple of other people stood around waiting. A young chap had set up his SLR camera with a long telescopic lens mounted on a tripod nearby. Total silence reigned except for a distant dog barking and the odd cow in the fields below greeting the dawn. Unfortunately my view of the dawn from my garden is blocked by a low hill. So I had chosen the highest hill on Fyn to observe and record this eclipse. I could not take my usual mountings with me or I would have had a much more stable base to work from.

Eventually the sun rose out of the low clouds and I was able to take some hand held images through the 90mm Vixen refractor using the 26mm Meade 4000 eyepiece. The Sun was so dull and low that I did not need the Baader Solarfilm filter for the early shots. This one captured a sunspot. Quite pleasing considering the difficulty of holding the camera to the eyepiece with the telescope on my Bogen 3040 video tripod with pan-and-tilt head.

Local maximum obscuration with a thin veil of cloud. Well worth the effort of such an early rise.
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