I knew I was going to be away for the transit (and so would not be able to use my 300mm diameter AG12 telescope). So I packed a 4″, 500mm focal length SkyWatcher achromatic, a SkyTracker mount and my trusty Canon 450D camera into my travel bag. Not great but I was determined to try and get something if the weather permitted. The whole lot weighed 3 kg, so just under the quoted 3.5 kg max load for the SkyTracker. Here’s the setup in our little garden at our cottage in Ashwell, Herts:
I simply guessed where south was and had the latitude set on the SkyTracker. This caused the image of the Sun to ‘walk’ slowly down the frame so that every 45 minutes or so I had to quickly re-position the Sun in the view finder. The solar filter is homemade using Baader solar photography film.
I took pictures every 30 seconds and for the last 15 minutes of the eclipse ran outside to the village green to get a better view of the horizon – and got some strange looks from a parked police car and some passersby!
The individual frames were aligned in Maxim DL which couldn’t handle the partially cloudy images and the batch align (under the process/stack option) created invalid Fits files – very disappointing. I used Photoshop to brighten the images and applied a high pass filter to improve sharpness.
The video is a bit jumpy, but, given the modest nature of the equipment used, I am not too dissatisfied. Mercury appears after a couple of seconds about halfway up on the left middle of the Sun (it is very small). At the end of the video you can see the trees from the horizon appear across the face of the Sun. It’s best if you view the video FULL SCREEN. Here it is: