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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Chit Chat _ Mercury Transit 2019

Posted by: JRehling Nov 9 2019, 07:30 PM

Just a heads-up to anyone who would like to witness this event, the upcoming transit will be the last until 2032. I saw the 1999 transit and the purity of the blackness and roundness of Mercury against the Sun's disc is something to see. Now, I'm left to hoping that weather will permit me to view it.

Posted by: MahFL Nov 11 2019, 01:17 PM

I took this with my 60mm spotting scope and 45X zoom.

Posted by: JRehling Nov 12 2019, 11:34 AM

That's great! If you don't mind, here is your image after the same transformations I applied to the picture I took of the 2012 transit of Venus taken the same way, undistorting it and realigning the RGB layers.

I took dozens of pictures of this transit but it's a tough target and telescopes designed for general purpose are not optimized for the Sun. Heating the air inside my SCT causes turbulence and there's no way to shoot the Sun for an hour without that happening. Your spotter scope did a nicer job of capturing it all in color, holistically, than my determined efforts to maximize magnification, but here's one of my zooms taken in IR that came out decently.

Posted by: paraisosdelsistemasolar Nov 16 2019, 09:06 AM

It was a really wonderful transit. I took this image from home:

Posted by: JRehling Nov 20 2019, 05:41 PM

That's great! It's a fun event. I placed my transit closeup next to the best pictures I've taken of Mercury and it was fun to see how big it appears compared to other situations. Too bad that (comparatively) large disk is all black instead of showing the day side.