Скачать или смотреть Transit of Mercury May 9, 2016

My 6-minute video incorporates real-time (not time-lapse) footage of the transit of Mercury of Monday, May 9, 2016.

I shot video sequences in early morning, not long after sunrise and then again at the very end of the transit, at egress just before local noon.

In between, I shot still images every 30 seconds to eventually turn into a time-lapse movie and to layer into a still-image composite. That image ends this movie.

All movies and still were shot with a 130mm (5-inch) apo refractor, with a 2X Barlow lens to give an effective focal length of 1600 mm. Using the cropped-frame Canon 60Da camera, the disk of the Sun just nicely fill the frame. Some HD sequences were shot without the Barlow at 780mm focal length. Two video sequences were shot with the camera in 640480 Movie Crop mode which provide 1:1 pixel resolution of a highly magnified image.

My location was Kamloops, B.C., a site I drove to the day before the transit to escape widespread cloud in southern Alberta. It proved excellent, with only low horizon cloud obscuring the Sun at sunrise and occasional convective cloud in late morning before egress.

From BC, the Sun rose with the transit in progress. Between that and the clouds at sunrise I was not able to shoot video footage until about an hour after sunrise, and not begin to take time-lapse stills until at least 90 minutes after sunrise. So we miss the beginning of the transit here.

It was an adventure chasing into the “shadow of Mercury” to see its rare transit across the disk of the Sun.