Mercury Transit : One week to go

On May 9th the planet Mercury will transit the sun. The last time we could observe this was in 2006 but this was not visible in Belgium. From Earth only Venus and Mercury can transit the sun as they are closer to the sun then Earth. These transits are rare and with Mercury this only happens about 13 times per 100 year.
For Belgium and the rest of Western Europe the transit is seen from begin (ingress) till end (egress). Timing is set below - be aware this is UTC which means for the region Time=UTC+2h and these are depending of the location of the observer - changes up to a couple of minutes.

Never look at the sun with the naked eye!! Use special sun filters or use projection methods to observe the transit. Below figure shows how Mercury will move across the sun. 

The sun on May 1 - PST Coronado

It was a beautiful day with a lot of sun. I tried to take pictures with my D60 Nikon and PST but failed as focus point could not be found - even with as many tools, connectors...

Thus finally below picture was taken afocal with my iPhone 6 and edited using CS4 in b/w. Below right you can see some of the flares.

Weather Summary April 2016

April 2016 was a relative normal month but this years April was wettest compared with 2014 and 2015.

Nikon D60 Shuttercounter and Exif format

Wondering how many clicks you made with your D-SLR camera? Well it's easy as your Jpeg picture has this data embedded. Just use a exif viewer/reader (exchangeable image file format) and open a most recent jpeg picture and you will find out. I'm personally using software from Opanda eg. Iexif 2.3 exif reader.
So, and how many I currently have: 39904.... see below

Airplane in front of moon

Picture is changed, so passengers are little more confortable :)

Moon and airplane

Lucky shot when airplane crossed the moon. Picture taken with iPhone 6 afocal on Orion XT12 60x magnification.

Moon with iPhone 6

Picture of 98.5% moon taken with iPhone 6 - afocal on Orion XT12 with 60x magnification.