Well, I had a poke at Sunspot 923 (1/1800) but it just didn’t work today. The seeing looked as if it should be okay, but everything was a little soft with high frequency jitters, as the image shows.
I next tried Venus (8/1800) and Mercury (9/1800), both of which were dancing around like whirling dervishes with their pants on fire. Mercury is the planet showing a phase.
Thanks for the comments guys, it was an interesting morning. I tried to view Mercury, Venus, Mars and the Moon, whilst ignoring Jupiter as it was way too close to the Sun. The distance from the Sun to the Planets and Moon were as follows (in degrees):
I couldn’t pick up Mars or the Moon, either visually or with the ToUcam. However, I did see (visually) several white objects whizzing through the field of view - maybe high flying birds?
As a safety measure, I re-fitted the solar filter before all GoTo’s, just in case the Sun accidentally entered the FOV during the slew. Attached file shows how it looked in Starry Night Pro.
Mike – I grabbed Mercury around 1:40pm, at an altitude of approx 40 degrees, so it was well past the Meridian and on its way down.
I had the Meade 647 flip mirror fitted, with a Meade 30mm Plossl in the viewing port. This eyepiece is parfocal with the ToUcam in the imaging port, so I could find and centre the objects. Even so, it was a little tricky as with the Vixen x2 Barlow plugged into the ToUcam, the FOV is only 2.3 x 2 arc mins.
Just to prove it wasn’t a fluke and that any GoTo mount can do this (careful of the nearby Sun!), here are a couple of efforts from today, 21st Nov 2006 around 12:40pm, this time using the Vixen 102mm f9 refractor with x5 TeleVue PowerMate and Philips ToUcam 840K.
Mercury was 25 frames from 960, Venus 23 from 341. Not pretty, but good fun none the less.
