Slightly crazy solar setup for the Mercury transit

[Stu]

Just thought I would post up a little report on the slightly left field rig I used yesterday to observe the Mercury transit. I had originally thought of using the Vixen Sphinx mount with just the Tak and Coolwedge on it. With the very dodgy forecast I then thought it best to stick with something that would be quick to setup and break down incase i had to dodge showers.

I settled on the Ercole on my Gitzo tripod, and decided to take both the Tak and the PST mod, both with binoviewers. Then, with improving but still variable forecast I thought I would take my EQ platform along in order to have tracking for a steadier view, and less need to find the sun again after each cloudy spell.

This ended up working very well. I set the tripod at its lowest for stability and could observe quite comfortably on my chair which goes down low too. The only thing that didn't work well was binoviewing the PST Mod. Conditions just weren't good enough for the higher powers and the views lacked brightness and sharpness due to the need for a Barlow to reach focus. I switched to mono observing and settled on a 24mm Panoptic which gave very clear and bright views including of the lovely proms on display. It does not show full disk but otherwise gives excellent results.

Some pictures attached showing the best cropped images I have of the setup, plus some others from the day.

The 10" dob had a home made sub aperture solar film filter fitted and was giving excellent higher power views, and we also had a TS72mm with TS Herschel wedge, a Lunt 60mm Double Stack and finally another Tak with CoolWedge. All gave great views, and we had a fun afternoon, lucky to avoid any rain and get enough breaks in the cloud to see the transit. I only took one picture with my phone which came out ok, but didn't show the nice granulation I was seeing visually at the beginning of the transit.

[Rob]

Nice!.. Looks great and delivered I see. Always nice to have a little gathering also for an event!. Good Stuff

Rob

[timwetherell]

Nice pics! And I know what you mean about the quick pack down, only in England do we need rain proof solar telescopes!  Our club had a session for the transit and we were literally watching mercury transit the sun and getting rained on at the same time

[mikeDnight]

Great pics Stu. A tiny piece of history frozen in time! 👍

Edited November 13, 2019 by mikeDnight

[niallk]

Looks great Stu - nice to make an event of it!

I grabbed a very quick 5min view in my LS50DS between rain showers, but I didn't get to set up and show folk I work with as I'd hoped to due to the conditions.