Just Wraping Up Our Transit Party!

[Ad Astra]

Putting the scopes away and saying goodnight to the guests - we battled the clouds and pretty much won, getting a great view of the transit of Venus today.

We had two solar scopes, a Coronado Solarmax 40mm. A very nice scope with a smooth helical focuser - very important as seeing prominences and such requires a precise focus. This scope also has a tunable etalon filter that is normally used to dial in surface features on the Sun - today we used it to sharpen the image of Venus very nicely. We tried, but failed to see the planet cutting into the solar corona; in fact, ingress was probably underweigh for as much as 20-30 seconds before we spotted it. We had a running battle with clouds scudding across the skies all afternoon. It actually threatened to rain for a bit, but fortunately we stayed dry. I have a new Canon video camera (Vixia M500) and I attached it to the Orion steadypix mount so that the camera shot video through a 25mm EP lens. This combination worked very well - the Vixia camera is quite small and lightweight, well within the limit of the Orion clamp and the entire apparatus was steady as a rock. We were also running the relatively tiny Coronado scope on the Skyview Pro equatorial mount that is normally used to drive a 120mm Apo refractor. The Coronado was hardly longer than the saddle plate, so adding a few ounces of camera and eyepiece clamped together made absolutely no difference to the steadyness of the mount. If you have a long refractor or your mount is already at weight capacity - then adding a steel clamp and camera hanging off the eyepiece might challenge you. But if your mount is solid, you should have no trouble with this. I got one good video, now I've got to figure how to get it off of my brand new camera and posted where you all can enjoy it. Its kind of pretty, but you get to see clouds drifting across the H-alpha image of Sol and Venus early in the transit. Several friends got decent shots of Venus in transit through the afternoon, but it was hide and seek with the clouds all day.

I want to hook it up to the Apomax and try Saturn with the new video camera, but tonight was not the night. Tomorrow is a workday, so everyone had to go home at a reasonable hour. We did set up the Apomax 133mm f/12 and the Orion 120mm EON f/6 Apo refractor after sunset. Saturn was the attraction of the night and the Apomax was the star here. With a 5mm Edge-On EP, we had wonderful views at 320x. The Cassini division stood out clearly, and we could easily see the shadow of the rings projected on the planet's surface. The A, B, and C rings were clearly defined, and A and B showed some radial structure and clear density/brightness differences around their circumferences. Clear banding on the planet's atmosphere was detected, and significant structure (banding) in the polar region. Titan, Rhea, Tethys, and Dione were definitely spotted and logged - there was some dispute about another moon near Tethys, Stellarium identifies this as Mimas. We looked for, but did not find Iapetus.

I'll post some pics tomorrow - off to bed and dream of transiting planets. Do you realize that this is exactly the signal that the Kepler satellite looks for as it searches the skies for exoplanets? Our star's light got dimmer for a few hours - and astronomy capable civilizations for thousands of light years could see this too and know that there were small rocky worlds close enough to this yellow dwarf star to be within its habitable zone.....

I'm going off to bed to dream about this as the dip in the brightness of Sol gives a signal which speeds off into the vast dark at the speed of light, carrying evidence of our existence out into the cosmos.

Dan