[meteorite-list] OT: Spotting Mercury transit today

From: (wrong string) ørn Sørheim <bsoerhei_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:25:36 2004
Message-ID: <200305071223.OAA04435_at_mail47.fg.online.no>

Hello List,
Very cloudy western Norway today, beeing waken by my
alarm clock at 5:55 a.m. No chance, all clouded out
I thought, when taking a peek outside...
I set the clock to 9:30, hoping for a wonder by then.
I woke up at 7:45, and to my surprise, at the other end of my town
the sun was shining, but not where I was. Waited for 15 minutes,
but the sun wouldn't come out for real, so I tried
to sleep some more.
One hour later the sun was really trying to come out,
so I went down, brought my 7x50 binoculars with a solar filter.
Managed to get a slice of bread, and went down in the garden
to try to spot Mercury. Well amidst the clouds flying over
the face of the sun I saw some big spot, near the center
of the disk. Couldn't have been Mercury, I thought, it's
in the wrong place, not near to the limb as predicted.
After getting a handrest I was able with great difficulty
to se another speck, nearer to the limb. Gotya! I had least
managed to see it, at the limit of the prevailing conditions...

But to my great astonishment, not so long after, almost all
the clouded sky cleared up in a few minutes, a real WONDER!
I rushed in, as fast as I could, getting all the 4 pieces of my
selfbuilt 12" GEM Newtonian, about 100 kg total, plus equipment.
Set it up in record time, and there it was - a very round speck on the
Sun's disk. About 13 arcseconds to be exact. Certainly no sunspot,
clearly defined. The big sunspot (with its umbra and penumbra),
seen in the binoculars was up to the right, in my upside down view.
The seeing was far from perfect, so I saw no details on the planet limb,
using only 130x, but a clearly round Mercury slowly crossing the
disk of the sun in ~5h 15 minutes.
The fairly good conditions lasted about one hour, but about 1 1/2 hour,
before last contact, (at 12:32 local MEST), the clouds took over the sky,
and the opportunity was firmly shut again! There also was a little
rain, shortly there after.
Well I saw it, got no photos, but two others also managed to see it
in my telescope.
In total, a worthwhile experience...
Next opportunity, June 8th, 2004, Venus!...

Regards,
Bjørn Sørheim,
Norway
Received on Wed 07 May 2003 08:23:00 AM PDT