Mercury Transit Revisited

Back on Nov. 2, 2006 Ray or maybe Crumby were fixing to view the Mercury transit set to occur around sundown on that date.  An accounting of that misadventure is still contained within this, long-running blog. Mercy!  To view an account of that sad event, type in Mercury transit in the search box

In the meantime, Ray or Crumby had way better luck with the more recent Venus transit, June 5, 2012, also documented and searchable in this ancient tome or blog.  Somehow, documenting that second transit was really easy.   Photos taken actually revealed a sphere on a sphere.

This time though, we have regressed or backslid.  Not all the way back to the original miserable Mercury transit event.  No. We did better than that.  But nowhere near as swell as with Venus.  Here's  our excuses.

We were expecting cloudy conditions on the morning of May 9.  Therefore, we made no preparations for this transit.  Then, as Mercury was set to occlude part of Ogma Sunface,  the clouds parted.  Hurriedly we began to assemble the planet transiting gear.  Yet we soon became aware that hardware was missing from the planet transit tripod.  Yes.  Two essential screws for mounting the C90 to the tripod could not be found. So we had to rig up employing a photo tripod.  Bad!

Here's what we stick into either hole of the bifurcated C90  to take pictures, thus  adding even more weight to the photo tripod.  That's an ancient Olympus c5060wz, digi t gizmos and a 32mm plossl you need to stick in the hole. Not good!

Then too the wind was blowing extra hard so with that and the photo tripod we couldn't screw down the camera good and everything was constantlyvibrating.  Plus the camera didn't want to focus like it's supposed to. Nevertheless, we took  over a hundred photos.  Five of them semi-came out.  Here's a couple of those.
So generally,  we consider this particular Mercury transit to be a qualified success.  Photo coloring is artificial.

o