Observation of the Mercury Transit.

ESO-Garching May 7, 2003

In collaboration with the Public Relation Department of ESO, and if the weather in Garching allows it, our group will cover the Mercury Transit event with our equipment from ESO Headquarters in Garching.

Characteristics of the observation:

For this event, we plan to set our telescope Meade LX200 F6.3, and with equatorial mount, in the parking lot of ESO where we could have access to the Sun during the duration of the Mercury transit):

The telescope will be configured with a solar filter, a Barlow lens, a camera Nikon D-100 with CCD RGB of 12-bits and maximal resolution of 3008x2000 pixels (physical size: 23.7mm by 15.6mm)

During the transit, the telescope will point to track the Sun at the location of the first contact. The software of the CCD camera will be set to take a JPEG picture every minute. The last picture will be displayed in this page (don't forget to reload!!) and soon after the end of the transit we hope to be able to provide a small MPEG film of approximately 10 seconds.

Here is a sample (reduced to 640x425 and 9Kb) of an image of the SUN taken with this configuration:

The CAOS group.