Mercury memories 9 May 2016
This is a montage of the best bits from my images of the transit of Mercury on 9 May. My local area was generally clouded out so I'd gone on a two and a half hour trek with all the kit to a relative in Lincolnshire, where the Sun was predicted to be at good visibility for most if not all the transit.
Top left is a photo of the kit all in action, I'm standing next to the Quark and 70mm refractor on my modified iOptron camera mount carrying the 70mm refractor. The Canon 7D and zoom lens fitted with a solar filter used for the lower left image are to the left in the photo. Also in there somewhere are two laptops, various power cables and adaptors and a mono USB3 CCD. One of the more important bits of kit turned out to be the umbrella, both for seeing what the cameras were tracking by shielding the laptops and keeping me from turning to a crisp under the strong sunlight!
The three timed images spaced diagonally are the best upside down refractor images filmed through the USB3 CCD of the transit. The first image is my earliest one and I did try to get further images as late as 18:04 UT, 37 minutes before the transit was due to end, but thin cloud and local trees defeated my attempts to capture a clean stackable image at that point. The middle image is a linked mosaic working my way in from the right hand edge of the Sun until reaching Mercury. Each image in the mosaic is a stack of around 600 best frames from a ten-second burst at 100-125 frames per second.
Peter
Mercury memories 9 May 2016
This is a montage of the best bits from my images of the transit of Mercury on 9 May. My local area was generally clouded out so I'd gone on a two and a half hour trek with all the kit to a relative in Lincolnshire, where the Sun was predicted to be at good visibility for most if not all the transit.
Top left is a photo of the kit all in action, I'm standing next to the Quark and 70mm refractor on my modified iOptron camera mount carrying the 70mm refractor. The Canon 7D and zoom lens fitted with a solar filter used for the lower left image are to the left in the photo. Also in there somewhere are two laptops, various power cables and adaptors and a mono USB3 CCD. One of the more important bits of kit turned out to be the umbrella, both for seeing what the cameras were tracking by shielding the laptops and keeping me from turning to a crisp under the strong sunlight!
The three timed images spaced diagonally are the best upside down refractor images filmed through the USB3 CCD of the transit. The first image is my earliest one and I did try to get further images as late as 18:04 UT, 37 minutes before the transit was due to end, but thin cloud and local trees defeated my attempts to capture a clean stackable image at that point. The middle image is a linked mosaic working my way in from the right hand edge of the Sun until reaching Mercury. Each image in the mosaic is a stack of around 600 best frames from a ten-second burst at 100-125 frames per second.
Peter