Here's an image of a portion of the Mercury solar transit that occurred yesterday. Click here for the larger version, or Click here for an animated "movie". I used a Phillips SC9000N webcam attached to my 12", which was covered up to allow only about 2" of aperture through some Baader solar film. This picture shows the progress of Mercury as it approached egress, between about 2325 UTC and 2410 UTC.
It was a really fun event, Larry and I set up at Dean's house and we watched the transit from initial contact a few minutes past noon until it finished at about 5:15 local time. In addition to my setup, we viewed it through several instruments including a Coronado PST and a 5" Celestron. The H-alpha views through the PST were really nice, I wish I could have imaged through that but I wasn't able to reach focus. Dean also imaged the event through 2 different scopes, one with a Canon 20Da and another with a CCD. His images are much better, see galaxies.com. Basically it was a great way to enjoy the hobby during an unusual time for astronomers, as we are normally working on this stuff at night.
Today I spent almost 13 hours driving to San Jose, CA with Dean to attend AIC2006, the Advanced Imaging Conference. I can hardly wait to get started with the forums tomorrow, I am sure I'm going to learn an awful lot while I'm here. Plus it's a nice little break from work (yes, I do work...but that's not the topic of this blog, so you rarely here me talk about it here!)
Postscript: Dean pointed out to me that the original image was "backwards", as a result of the mirror image created by the telescope; this is closer to the correct orientation to a human earth-bound observer, i.e. the planet moved from left to right across the solar disk.
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