Mercury from SGL5

[michaelmorris]

One of my observing targets for SGL5 was Mercury. I've never seen it before and I wanted to observe it, sketch it and image it. Thanks to help from lots of people I managed to do all three.

My particular thanks goes to Allan Jones who let me observe and image Mercury through his lovely Celestron 4SE - that's a nice little scope Allan.

The image was taken from a 2000 frame capture with my Mono Toucam Pro II fitted with an IR/UV cut filter. The seeing was so awful that, in the end, I had to manually select 69 frames for stacking. Processing was carried out in Registax, then Photoshop.

[jgs001]

Well done Mike, even finding it was tricky...

[michaelmorris]

Well done Mike, even finding it was tricky...

Allan did that.

[AllanJ]

Well, the GOTO scope did it for me really, I just aligned it on Venus and hit the button! Mike did the hard work.

[Pete Presland]

nice pic!

i think a lot of people observed it for the first time last month ! i imaged it myself but unfortunatly it was pretty poor,but more than happy just to see it

[Hypernova]

We had a hard time trying to spot it at the last astro club meet back in mid April, was VERY low down when I managed to locate it in the finder but I was rewarded with a nice defined gibbous pahse, a bit like Venus but smaller and dimmer.

[TheThing]

Allan's GOTO was spot on! I had a squint thru too (thanks Allan), my first time of seeing Mercury.

Great picture Michael. Hard work was worth it. How did you get the frame round it?

[albedo0.39]

Searched hard for this at SGL5 visually and thought I saw it... but It was hard in the twilight (and a lot dimmer than I expected !)

Well done you for capturing

[michaelmorris]

... How did you get the frame round it?

It's a slightly modified version (deeper lower part of the frame) of the 'astro frame' action from Noel Carboni's excellent Photoshop Actions.

Astronomy Tools Action Set by ProDigital Software

[moocher]

Last months apparition was a very good one, quite a few reasonable evenings in which to image/ view it. Venus made it easy to locate.....well for me anyway.

Alan:)