Mercury Transit

A beautiful sunny day on 9th May for the long awaited Mercury transit of the sun. I set up my equipment at 12.00 ready to start imaging from my garden, not a cloud in the sky! It is amazing how hard it is to find the Sun with the filter fitted to the scope. Took a while to eventually find it. Also the Sun was VERY bright and I needed to put a black cloth over my head to be able to see the computer screen. The neighbours must have thought I was crazy!

Took lots of images using the Skywatcher 80ED Pro and Altair-Astro  GP-Cam with a 0.6 focal reducer fitted. I tried with different colour filters, White light, Yellow, Blue, Green and Orange. After the first hour I put the equipment away and then set up later in the afternoon to image the final hours of the transit.

First contact of Mercury with the Sun. (Top Left)

Yellow filter fitted.

White light.