Visiting Adler Planetarium Chicago

The Adler Planetarium in Chicago was the first one build in the western hemisphere and is the oldest one still operating. Outside the view of the Chicago skyline is fantastic and the statue of Copernicus welcomes you. Inside different expositions eg the moon race with Gemini and Apollo 13, planets, meteorites, the history of telescopes, instruments from the past and many shows.

Transit of Mercury May 9th

Visual observation using OrionXT12 of Mercury transit was quite good even the fact some high clouds.
Picture was taken using TAL 200K on AZ EQ6 mount with Nikon D60. On top and middle you are able the observe some sunspots and below Mercury is visible as a small dot. Picture was edited using CS4.

Transit Mercury

Great start of the Mercury Transit but clouds are covering sun right now. Need to wait some hours according meteoblue 😀

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 :)