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Observation: Transit of Mercury 2006

Description

I observed the transit of Mercury from Mervyn Thomas' place in St Clair, Dunedin.
The weather was clear and fine, but with a cool southerly wind.
We used Mervyn's Coronado PST, and Celestron C8 (with a solar filter in front of the corrector).
I also used my Canon EOS350D digital camera with a 75-300 mm telephoto lens (equivalent length 400 mm).
Mercury looked like a tiny sharp dot on the surface.
I got some reasonably successful photos using the telephoto lens and using afocal on the Celestron C8.
For the lens I used 1/1000 second at f/5 with the lens at 300mm (35mm equivalent approximately 400mm).
For the afocal photo I used an 18mm eyepiece on the C8 and a 35-80 mm lens on the camera at 35mm.
For post processing the photos I applied a curve to enhance the contrast and did minor sharpening.

Thoughts

This was a rare event which was worth observing. The weather had been poor leading up to the event, and the forecast was for cloud on the morning of the transit. By some miracle Dunedin's weather was great. It was even better when I heard that other centers around New Zealand had cloud and rain! I expected Mercury to look small compared with the Sun, but was surprised at how small it really was. A medium sized sunspot near the limb was much bigger.

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