I was in Utah from May 4 to May 15, chasing dinosaurs with Mike Taylor, a colleague of mine from England. I took a telescope along in hopes of getting some dark-sky time, and to hopefully catch the transit of Mercury on May 9.
Things did not look promising at dawn on the 9th. I was in Fruita, Colorado, and when I got out of bed, the sky was completely overcast. Mike and I decided to head out west of town to visit Rabbit Valley, where a nearly complete skeleton of the long-necked dinosaur Camarasaurus is visible in a hard sandstone ledge. (Why is no-one excavating this dinosaur? Because we already have many nice specimens of Camarasaurus, and the sandstone around this one is like concrete. It would be a mountain of work for very little payoff.)
We spent about two hours measuring and photographing the skeleton, and as we did so, the clouds started to break up a bit. By the time we got back to Fruita, a little after 11:00 AM, the sky was clear except for a few scattered wisps of cloud. I set up my telescope in front of the Dinosaur Journey museum and started watching and photographing the transit.
I was using the same setup as in the last post: my Celestron C80ED refractor, a Celestron 8-24mm zoom eyepiece, and a GoSky full aperture solar film filter. For photography, I used a Nikon Coolpix 4500 for still photos and my iPhone 5c for video.
I caught about the last hour of the transit, and I got to share the view with about a dozen museum staff and passersby. A few light clouds drifted through the field of view, which looked pretty cool and didn’t obscure the view at all.
At 12:42 Mercury finished exiting the disk of the sun. The next Mercury transit will be in 2019 – I hope I’m as lucky then as I was this time.
10 Minute Astronomy 