Astronomical Transits

From Earth only Mercury and Venus have orbits inside ours, and thus only they have the ability to directly cross the face of the Sun. These events are rare, and a closer version of the transits used to detect exoplanets.

Mercury Transit 2016

Mercury Transit - Composite

Composite Image of images taken approximately every half hour. ISO 100, f/6.3, exposures ranging from 1/125s to 1/2000s.

This is my first (and currently only) Mercury transit. The transit lasted 7 hours in total, and was 1 hour in when the Sun rose in Las Vegas.

I had been thinking about how to observe this event for a while, and I decided to use a solar-filtered Meade 8" LX6 Schmidt-Cassegrain for the camera. I took a 6-hour timelapse of the whole transit, and it worked out mostly okay. The main problem with the final result is the slight imperfections in the tracking of the polar mount, which required me to correct it constantly and caused the video to turn out mildly shaky.

Overall, it was a lot of fun and gave me a lot of pointers for the 2019 transit.