Transit of Mercury May 9th 2016

Picture taken during Transit of Mercury on May 9th, 2016 using TAL200K and Nikon D60. Editing done using CS4.

Sunspot 2542 with TAL200K

TAL 200K on AZ EQ6 mount with DSLR Nikon D60

One day before Mercury transit, try out completed using TAL 200K. This is a Klevtsov-Cassegrain telescoop. The TAL200K wat put on the skywatcher AZ EQ6 mount in AZ mode. Picture was taken into focus without reducer/barlow. Editing completed using CS4.

TAL200K on AZ EQ6 mount with baader film.

Phantom Sun

High clouds create some nice phantom sun's this evening.

My new AZ EQ6 Sky-Watcher mount

My new Sky-Watcher AZ-EQ6 SynScan arrived today. After 35 years using my first ever equatorial mount with a 114mm Newton I finally decided to purchase a new high tech equatorial mount. This AZ-EQ6 gives optimal stability and pointing accuracy for a wide variety of heavy professional photo and video equipments. It is a hybrid mount with alt-azimuth capability for general use, and equatorial capability for astrophotography use.

After opening the boxes it was time to set the mount with tripod. So far so good and now exploring all other features like the polar scope, synscan with tracking, calibration... and of course we still need to find a good fit with a new telescoop. But that's for later :)

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.