Mercury transit

[laudropb]

Looking good here. Nice blue sky with only a little whispy cloud. Hopefully the Sun will burn this off. Best of luck to everyone following the transit.

[Knighty2112]

Cheers!  Blue skies here too, so looking good. Going to water setting up around 11:30am, then settle in to watch the show!  

[iapa]

clearing slowly

alignment is about 30 deg off so tracking more or less by hand.

[skysculptor]

All set up! Little hazy but I can see quite well when sun bursts through! Looking good huge group of sun spots today too!

[JohnSadlerAstro]

Hi,

High cloud here, there's a chance that it might clear though!

John

 

[mjpfc]

I have my 8" with W'L Filter sitting out under a large umbrella.

With the weather forecast it will probably not move from there all day and I have left the PST indoors.

The BBC are showing cloud breaks around an hour after it finished this eve. If thats true then it will be pretty similar to the

cloud cover from 30 mins before to 20 mins after that the Island had for the last eclipse.

Better further north, so good luck everyone, I' m off to eat worms.

 

Mick

[skysculptor]

Wow! Superb Mercury looking great jus coming in to view on the edge of the sun!

[Pete Presland]

Conditions are Ca-k here, but have some nice glimpses so far.

[GavStar]

Wow indeed! Surprisingly sunny in London. At about 50x magnification with my 35mm Lunt I was surprised how clear and obvious it is. I caught first contact immediately and watched Mercury gradually take a v small bite out of the sun until it moved to be fully in view. Some nice other activity on the sun as well.

[laudropb]

Still bright blue sky here, but a problem with the wind shaking the mount. Still some great views as Mercury crossed the limb.

[mjpfc]

Hey ho,  No chance of contact sighting but I caught Mercury on the disc at 12:24 Through a thinner bit of cloud.

A stunningly sharp little disc in front of the granulation.

A few of these through the day will be good.

Mick.

[Davey-T]

 

I have my 8" with W'L Filter sitting out under a large umbrella.

With the weather forecast it will probably not move from there all day and I have left the PST indoors.

The BBC are showing cloud breaks around an hour after it finished this eve. If thats true then it will be pretty similar to the

cloud cover from 30 mins before to 20 mins after that the Island had for the last eclipse.

Better further north, so good luck everyone, I' m off to eat worms.

 

Mick

Sorry to here that Mick, I was supposed to be visiting rellys on the Island this week but cried off as I didn't want to cart all my solar stuff'

High cloud here but at least it's visible, makes up for the rained off Venus transit.

Dave

[Linda]

I am at work in my office. But I brought the scope along, on it's new travel mount. I just came back from having a look at Mercury.

Unfortunately I had to be in a meeting until 13.30 local time and missed the beginning of the transit that started at 13:11 local time. But I still looked at the sun and Mercury for 15 minutes or so. One of my colleagues who is a real astronomer also had a look. At 60x magnification, we saw a clear black circle in front of the sun, which had to be the planet. I found it really small.

In the middle of the sun there were some big oval sun spots and a lot of small ones. I saw a clear line along the oval spots. I also tried my 12mm ortho, which gives a 125x magnification. Unfortunately that view didn't become sharp. There was a thin haze of cloud, which might have been the cause. Or the sudden big outbreak of birch pollen, as the weather has suddenly turned almost tropical since a couple of days.  

As I didn't bring more eyepieces, I had to do with the 25mm, 60x, saw Mercury nice and sharp and the sun spots a bit vaguely. Still nice to have seen it already now. I'll look again when I'm home.

My new travel mount did the job. It is a bit wobbly when I move the scope, but when I look at it without touching the scope, the view is standing still.