MERCURY TRANSIT

Hot of the presses 0801amedt here. I am surprised how big it is because Astronomy said it would be a dot. Also, Sol is still pretty active! Tom Dey

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above was H-alpha. This one is white light taken at 0832amedt Tom

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Nice photos. Thanks for sharing.

Was very windy here but still had quite a lot of students stopping by to look. Many were amazed that they could take a photo using their phones.

Thanks Tom for posting the two nice images of the Mercury transit from yesterday. I observed in both white light and in H-alpha over the several hours from the Goldendale Observatory here in Washington State. We had a nice time over the last 2/3 of the transit which was already in progress when the sun rose about 5:30 am PDT. I was able to look in a 6 inch f/15 refrator with a white light filter on a huge GEM, and was able to look thru my 8 inch SCT with a white light filter as well as my PST for the H-alpha view. The Obervatory also was live streaming images from two different H-alpha scopes (a 6 inch Lunt and another shorter focal length refractor) both were each equipped with a HD camera so that we could see real time H-alpha images at 30 frames per second. Your images are very representative of what we saw yesterday and will serve as a nice reminder to me.

Best Regards, Ed

Thanx for the feedbacks! Sun is fun because couple small grab & go OTAs, Vixen Porta with JMI Train n Trak, out to the deck, few snapshots and back inside. Took practice to get my technique down, but now any time sun is interesting and favorable --- immediate gratification. Tom