Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

Howdy Jan

I have a couple of different telescopes that I use, but for yesterday's transit of Mercury I used an Orion 127mm Mak-Cass, mostly with a Celestron 26mm Plossl eyepiece, though I also briefly used an Orion 15mm & 9mm Plossl for greater magnification (and distortion too), but only included one such photo. The photo images were captured with my old beat-up Canon A1100is pocket digital camera, that has way too many miles on it, just holding it loosely in position over the eyepiece on a macro setting, and wiggling it around until some sort of image appears, then trying to squeeze off the shutter without any undue movement. Not ideal, nor even close to adequate .... but sometimes it sort of works. The 26 mm eyepiece allowed me to frame the entire Sun with a little room to spare, thus allowing a good visual size comparison, and perhaps the most distortion free image, though I was getting plenty of atmospheric distortion due to the low sun angle and the proximity of rapidly heating ground surface throughout the foreground for at least the nearest few miles.

Yes, there was most definitely a solar filter on the telescope, except for the very first image of the Sun just coming over the glacial moraine. I had hoped to next capture an image where you could see Mercury on the face of the Sun, and still see the top of the moraine, but for the few seconds when that was possible, I couldn't get the camera into the correct position to get a proper focus. Oh well .... better luck next time ...  ;c)