Eagleseye

I had no more spare holidays to take, so had to work the day of the Mercury transit. But I took my Ha solar scope into work so I could at least view the ingress of the planet at lunchtime.

Watching through the scope I could see the extremely small disk of Mercury just starting to bite into the Suns disk. Right by a bright prominence. It moved onto the disk much quicker than I remembered from the previous transit. That is an image that is hard wired into my hard disk upstairs and will live in the mind for a long long time. I showed a few people from work the transit from about half 12 BST, then packed up and went back to work.

When I finished work at 4pm, I dashed home and opened up the dome and started to take pictures. The skies had got a little bit hazy by this time, but I was determined to try. Clouds and thick contrails kept moving across the Sun’s face, spoiling many AVI files captured by my DMK camera.

All was well until a little after 6pm, when clouds finally thickened and the Suns disk and Mercury’s small silhouette finally disappeared from view.

A great day, with fine weather for most people across the country so most people saw some of the event.
Here are my results, which I am well pleased with, especially with the cloud interfering. See image at the bottom for the average conditions.