| Transit of Mercury 7th May 2003 |
| A brief report on Green Witch's observations |
The LX90 was fitted with a white light filter and we piggy-backed the SolarView 50 on it. A Celestron SLO-Mo mount made it easy to align it with the LX90 |
We had planned to open the showroom early at 8 am to set up telescopes to show the transit to anyone who was interested, but then were persuaded by Dr Jeffrey that we should start at 6 am. So, we met at Lesley's house at 6 and set up a couple of telescopes with white light filters plus the SolarView 50 with its built-in hydrogen alpha filter.
At first we couldn't see the Sun for cloud but it started to clear round about half past six. There was then a bit of a competition to see who could pick up the disc first. When you take a telescope from the showroom and don't align the finder it can be a bit of a challenge to find the Sun when it first appears through the cloud and the contrast through the filter is low. Once we found it we could see that the transit was well under way and Mercury appeared as a very small but sharp silhouette against the Sun's disc. To emphasise how small Mercury is there was a sunspot almost in the middle of the Sun's disc that was considerably larger. It was quite easy to imagine how large the Earth would appear in similar circumstances.
Some people just don't like anyone looking over their shoulder |
We spent quite a bit of time experimenting with our cameras to record the event, and took the opportunity to try out different eyepieces. We didn't have adaptors for our digital cameras so all the photos were taken hand-held. The eyepiece that proved particularly good was the MaxView 40 from Scopetronix. I was impressed with it as a visual eyepiece and also found it very good for photography.
Lesley prepared an excellent breakfast which amost everyone enjoyed. I was about to have mine when we remebered we were supposed to open the showroom at eight, and as it was ten minutes to I had to shoot off to avoid keeping anyone waiting. I arrived just before eight but I wasn't the first. Jeffrey came with me and we soon got out some telescopes and got them working. Barry Warman was our first customer and he was so impressed he bought a solar filter for his ETX 125 and went home to try it out on the latter stages of the transit. Quite a few customers came in especially to see the transit and we also showed it to anyone who happened to be passing.
I never did get back for my breakfast but Lesley brought me a plateful to work which I had for my lunch.
Click here to see Jamie Cooper's photo of the transit
The sky was a bit hazy, even after the cloud had cleared, but these images give an idea of what we saw.
Neil Parker, May 17th 2003
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