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Sunday 24th May, from 7:30pm BST, 200p F/5, EQ3-2, diy Onstep Goto. I've enjoyed watching Venus wane to a thinner & thinner crescent recently, but have never observed Mercury. Having the 2 planets & the Moon only a few degrees apart this week was an opportunity not to be missed. But the gap between the trees & the hill to my West is only about 1 "fist" wide - maybe 40 minutes of observing time. And the late sunset time means Venus would have moved behind the hill before becoming naked-eye visible. I don't have a permanent setup & can't see Polaris from my patio so I observe from a very rough "polar alignment" & have marked the tripod leg positions on the patio so I don't need to Polar, or Star align every session. So, having made sure to "Park" the scope at the end of the previous night's session I could just plonk the setup on the marks, "Unpark", "Goto Venus" & lo and behold a tiny crescent Venus appeared about 1 degree from the centre of the the 9x50 Finder in a sky that was clear of cloud but still pure white from the solar glow ! Isn't Goto wonderful ? Venus was such a beautiful thin 4% crescent with "horns" stretching to the meridian. At first it was shimmering but that must have been a heat plume because a tiny tweak of the focus steadied the image. The seeing was surprisingly good for the low altitude. I enjoyed the view at up to X250 (4mm TMB), before a Goto to Mercury. Mercury was not visible in the Finder but was a tiny dot in the 32mm Plossl. At higher powers I saw it as a 45% crescent. I know it was about 62% illuminated so the sky must have been too bright for me to see its full extent. I don't claim to have seen any detail - the brightness just reduced steadily from the limb towards the terminator. I still couldn't see the Moon naked eye so did another Goto & looked in the Finder. Nothing ! But the bright sky must have been fooling my eye because when I forced myself to focus at infinity it popped in sight. The visible crescent was about half the thickness of a crosshair ! In a 20mm Plossl I could see about 6 medium sized faint, ghostly craters along the limb of a 4% crescent. So in about half an hour I had my first sight of Mercury, & seen my thinnest crescents of Venus & Luna. Isn't this hobby fantastic ? 😀

At around 14.35 GMT today I observed Venus, Mercury and Jupiter, with my 127mm Mak SLT GoTo. Venus was a large, very thin crescent, trembly in poor seeing. Mercury was easy to see once I got my eye in, and Jupiter was easier to pick out with a red filter. Mercury and Jupiter are now not far apart. (7min RA 3 deg Dec.) The visibility of Mercury seems dependent on atmospheric clarity. On several days recently I looked for it but could not see it.

Just bagged 10 minutes between the clouds and got to see the Mercury shadow transit! Its so long since I used the Lunt that I took a few seconds to get back into the groove of tuning the double stack and letting some air into the tuner as it was flat. Not much else on the disc - 3 x sets of proms, 3 tiny filaments, saw one small bright flux patch briefly. But the Mercury shadow was nice and clear and a decent sized patch too. Just got back inside before it started spotting with rain! Fingers crossed for another clear patch later ... Alan

We are hoping to observe the transit in school (Don’t panic - we have done several transits and partial eclipses in the past so we are fine on the safety aspects - thanks). However does anyone know how I can get hold of some links to use in advance of the day that we can use to put some professional feeds up on the large screen tellies we have linked up to the computer systems these days – I am told that links on YouTube are the easiest to handle on the slightly clunky system we have to control them. My question comes from reminiscing with colleges that my daughter and I had stayed up to watch first contact of the last transit of Venus live from Hawaii before swapping to Mt Wilson. (We were also up before dawn on top of the local hill fort as the sun rose having lugged an old 4” reflector up there.) Of course at the time we were just browsing through the internet not taking good note of sites we were on.

Luckily had a really clear evening with no clouds on the western horizon I'll try to catch the Venus- Uranus conjunction too at the end of this month

Here is some video I shot of the Venus & Mercury conjunction on the same evening I took the image. Watch out for the geese! Regards, Reggie

Hey guys. Thought about starting this thread. I feel like we all should inform eachother and newer members alike about the magngifications that can be achieved on planets,that provide the best sharpness/size ratio,depending on the scope and seeing. After this thread has grown a bit, i feel like this should be pinned,as to provide a little guide to newer members that are not experienced with planetary observing,as many will be fooled with the typical 50x per inch of aperture and get disappointed when they find that that image will be dim and blurry. For my 8” F/6 Sky-Watcher Dob For Saturn i like to use 150x in medium seeing and if i want something a bit bigger , switch to 240x ,which will give me a bigger,but blurrier image.iBut In good seeing, i found that 240x was very usable.When we have perfect conditions, i m certainly trying 300x. Mars, isnt very big in the sky right now,so even at high magnifications like 300x it still appears as a small orange dot. For observing mars,I suggest waiting for it to reach opposition.It benifits hugely from it! However,this happens once every 2 years....But 5ere are other planets to keep you occupied until then, such as jupiter,saturn and Venus. For Venus, i use 50-100-120 depending on its phase. For Jupiter, i like to use 150x, as it provides a very sharp image,with key features of the planet such as bands being very detailed.Waiting on my 6mm UWA Skywatcher to bring it to 200 and see how that plays out. Be careful! Don’t magnify jupiter too much, as it will loose much of its features and sharpness. Neptune and Uranus: These two will not impress, but are certainly have a nice colour to them. Even ar high magnifications, such as 300x and 400x, they will look like small discs with color in them.Uranus will look be colored green and Neptune a fainter blue. Mercury About mercury...Havent gotten the chance to observe it ,so the guys will have to inform you about that? Feel free to give your own opinions as to give members a wider source of information to help them observe better ! Cheers and clear skies. Kronos

I'm getting things together equipment I'm going to need for the 9th May transit. I already have a Baader Continuum filter but need a solar filter. I have a Celestron C6 and a Skywatcher Startravel 102 and need to know which scope will give me the best view so I can get the right size filter. Martyn.

It occured to me that I should share with you the timelapes of this year's Mercury transit as seen from Czech Republic. The clouds have parted for some 20 minuts, allowing me to capture this timelapse. I shot it with a modified webcam, Baader 2.25x Barlow and UV/IR cut filter, using my former SW MAK 102/1300.

Here is a quick shot of Mercury using my Orion Deep Space Video Cam II with my Orion 127mm Mak. The turbulence was pretty fierce because of the low elevation, but you can still make out the phase (I hope): Enjoy, Reggie

A couple of shots from this morning showing Venus, Mars, Jupiter & Mercury all lined up. Venus, Mars, Jupiter & Mercury by 1CM69, on Flickr Venus, Mars, Jupiter & Mercury by 1CM69, on Flickr

Hi all, before going comet hunting tonight I went and found a nice vantage point to observe tonights conjunction of Venus and Mercury. I believe I read they were around 1degree separated. They look great hanging low in the dusk sky and Mars was also visible higher up and more southerly. I took quite a few images but this 4sec ISO100 shot was my favourite. IMG_5654.cr2.tif https://www.flickr.com/photos/116958085@N07/16246201211/

Well, got my Skywatcher Startravel 120 frac all kitted up to observe the transit of Mercury on Monday 9th May. Whilst I normally use my smaller 70mm frac to observe the sun, I wasn't happy with the quality of the image I was getting when doing any solar views; there seemed to always be a lot of haze always surrounding the sun when viewed with the smaller scope, so thought I'd see how the larger frac coped with solar views, which after flocking all internal areas of it a few weeks ago, and also the inside of the end cap, thought it might produce less hazy images. And that is indeed the case. Rather than do a full size filter for the whole 120mm aperture, I rather opted just to put some Baader solar filter in the smaller aperture opening on the lens cap. I also made a small filter to go on the finder scope too. All in all took it about 45 mins to make both filters. Fixed the lens cap filter in place by glueing it inside the lens cap itself permanently. The finder scope filter is just held in place by just three elastic bands around the tube of the finder scope. Tested it out for a few hours today to make sure all work well, and that the glue I used didn't melt in any heat from the sun, so just now need a nice sunny day on Monday to sit and enjoy the views!

Hi all, just in case you get clouded out tomorrow, or can't view the event itself because of work, these two apps for IOS and Android should help you observe it; https://appsto.re/gb/9Pjacb.i https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ideorum.mercurytransit&hl=en Have fun!

I wasn't sure whether to post these in Solar Imaging, Planetary Imaging or Special Events so apologies if this is in the wrong place. Here are a couple of images of the Transit of Mercury. We were lucky with the weather which allowed us some clear views until about 4pm when cloud and then rain ended the session. Both images are taken from 1000 frame video processed in PIPP, AutoStakkert, Registax and Photoshop. Equipment: Celestron NexStar 127 SLT Skywatcher EQ5 Mount ZWO ASI120 MC imaging camera

This was probably my best effort... 900 frames at 12:28pm - earlier ones were battling exposure levels through the clouds! ED80, DBK camera, stacked in AutoStakkert then processed in PSCS5. Not a patch on some of the other images posted, but am pleased to have got this much!

Hi, even if there are much nicer images here I like to sum up my experiences, I guess it is still worth a read to compare and learn from my mistakes. I started to prepare the day before but was to lazy to test the equipment on site, so I just checked batteries and collected all parts. More than a hour before first contact I started to set up everything. I rolled out a cable drum to get power for several hours and the first thing I found is that the power adapters did not fit into the three plug sockets on the cable drum. Meanwhile the wind started to fresh up and did blow away my sunshade. Good that it does not hit anything of my equipment, getting sun cream it was only for me. Now getting a multiple socket. Found that ony adapter gives too much voltage which my motorized focusser did not like. Getting a battery. Setting up a sun shade for my laptop. Then I started to align the NexStar SLT Goto for sun. At least I did try... What worked a few weeks before did not work anymore. I entered 12:xx:xx time then PM and NO SUN IN THE ALIGNMENT menu... Dang, as european I also tried AM because that AM/PM is quite strange for me and errror prone. Checked the sun menu, enabled. Even tried to disable it. Then I realized (now only about 20 minutes to the first contact) that whatever I entered AM/PM the next try the time was at 00:xx:xx, so that stupid scope ignored AM/PM! No chance to get the sun in the menu for alignment. DANG! I was nearly so angry to ditch all that scope into the ground. The I took a depth breath and changed the time zome to 0 (UTC) and substracted an hour to the entered time, so it now got 11:xx:xx which works with AM/PM... Celestron get your firmware right! Now focussing which was a bit hard with only the few sun spots and bad seeing. I thought I did it right, but later the mercury was not that sharp as I wished. I decided to shot every minute bursts of 5 images at ISO 200 and 1/1250s exposure time which looked good on the laptop. Then my intervallometer failed. So I triggered the camera via USB from DigiCamControl. JUST at the first contact time clouds came. DANG. So I did miss a good part of the time between first and second contact, also still struggeling with the intervallometer. After I made a ok image of the second contact I was able to get the intervallometer back to work (note to myself: investigate!) and had firstly a bit time to relax. Posted a image to a friend who was connected via chat with me. After some time I found that the images on screen where not showing the actual happening which I can see through the DSLR finder. I tried to put the images on my NAS but that seemed to be too slow, so I did gat a big delay. I though it would have been a good idea, so I could get out of the sun and process some images on my Desktop PC while they are coming in. After changing to the local disk things worked better, but then I found that I had a copy image batch in DigiCamControl to make a copy to my Desktop and there my usual Backup tried to back it up via the network (WLAN) also. Which did saturate the network quite easy... I may have worked to save the images on the NAS without that, but now I was using the local disk. HOWEVER. My mount did not track the sun very well, and with my DSLR at 1500mm focal length there is not much room at the top and bottom borders, so I had to correct the FOV every few minutes. Maybe it was the strange workaround I needed to to for the alignment, or I did entered some wrong time (even did use solar tracking speed) or the wind gusts just did their bad. So I was tied to my laptop for hours in the sun. Man I was quite tired that evening :-) What else went wrong: During the hours I swapped the camera battery and rotated it a bit. Also during messing with my intervallometer bursts are stupid. Too many images, I thought I could stack the 5 images but in the end it was too much work or I did need a script (which costs time to write) I did not refocus dust on my sensor (I guess so. check the video below) before starting a big session set back the image counter in the camera to 0000 so that it will not wrap up and mess your named sequence try everything a day before, don't be lasy even more than an hour setup time can be to few whan things go bad derotation (look at the strange curve of mercury in the video, normal at Alt/az) for the images failed because of the small and unsharp sun spots neighbors cat came to check my equipment. walked across the keyboard, could easy delete all ;-) Location was in the south of Berlin, Germany. First contact 13:12:07 and because of trees I could image until 17:00 local time. So a few words for the equipment: Celestron Mak127 NexStarSLT AltAz Goto Mount, Astrosolar filter foil (for visual), Nikon D5100, DigiCamControl to liveview and get images from the SD, DIY motorized focusser and DEW heater control (not used here...), DIY intervallometer (Arduino based). Software: For single images I used FITSwork and GIMP (2.9.x 32bit/channel). For resequencing, cropping and quality estimation I used PIPP. For making the animations from the sequences, sharpening and encoding I used Blenders video parts and bits (http://blender.org). Here is a animation of all good images including some clouds, I needed to stop at 17.00 local time (utc+1). After all I am still happy with my results. No worries here, still like that hobby :-) Cheers, Carsten

Hi all, I was lucky to have the opportunity - and the sky - to watch and sketch the transit. This sketch has been done at the beginning of the transit, showing Mercury at about 1320 CEST near the prominence at the eastern limb. Telescope: Lunt LS50 THaB600PT Eyepiece: TS HR Planetary 7mm Date & Time: Mercury transit time Location: Dusseldorf region, Germany Technique: Koh-i-Noor soft pastels and pastel pens on Daler Rowney Ebony black sketching paper Clear and sunny skies! Achim

Hi, As the title suggests. Poor weather here, but it would be good to see other people's images! John