Hinode,
Earth orbit
Nov. 08

Japan's Hinode spacecraft used its Solar Optical Telescope to capture a 0.2-arcsecond resolution movie of Mercury transiting the sun. See also the X-ray Transit of Mercury.

The image was taken aprox. 5 mins before 1st contact. From the charts I downloaded from Spaceweather.com, it looked like there was a good chance that the planet would be close to the prominence on the southeastern limb. So I set the camera for a prom exposure and sure enough I saw the first contact and eventually the whole disk. It was very cool, and the transit hadn't even started yet. The setup was a Takahashi Sky 90 equipped with a Solar Spectrum 0.2Ang H-Alpha filter and a Skynyx 2-1 CCD camera.

A very young astronomer (Ryan Dunn) was helping out with the days activities and manning the Solar viewer and expertly explaining the details and dynamics of today's transit to the public.(Ryan Dunn is pictured left and Trent Kitts is on the right.) The Albuquerque Astronomical Society set us various types and sizes of properly filtered scopes for the public and students to view the transit through.

Photo details: Canon Rebel DSLR and C9.25'f/10 Schmidt-Cassagrain telescope.

The clouds were so thick that I did not think I was going to be able to see anything. Finally a small break in the clouds allowed me to see the transit. The big sunspot on the limb made it even more dramatic.

I took this photo during sun-rise. My equipments are only a DC and a pair of binoculars. The most natural solar filter(dust in air) has been used. Hope you like it!

Watercolor of the transit. (Image was from the National Solar Observatory.)

This sequence of Mercury's rare transit across the sun was shot every ten minutes on November 8, 2006. The planet's silhouette can be seen moving from left (11:10 a.m. PST) to right (1:41 p.m. PST) in front of the sun's brilliant photosphere. The sunspot just rounding the sun's limb on the left is many times larger than the Earth. Mercury's next transit of the sun occurs in 2016.

Photo details: Canon 20D attached to an 80mm University Optics refractor; ISO 100, f/6, 1/320-second exposure.

Photo details: White light image: FS-102 and a Herschel Wedge. H-alpha image: SolarMax 60DS.