Transit of Mercury pictures
The transit of Mercury is in progress! If you want to go out and look at this for yourself, you have until just about midnight UT (4 PM Pacific, or until sunset, whichever happens first -- the sun sets while the transit is still in progress for people in the eastern half of the US). There are also various observatories/museums doing live webcams etc. if you Google for it (though unsurprisingly a lot of them are experiencing heavy traffic).
This warning bears repeating: DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN, ESPECIALLY THROUGH BINOCULARS OR A TELESCOPE! Permanent eye damage occurs immediately and without warning (there are no pain receptors in the retina, just the blink reflex of the eye)! Use pinhole projection (although you may have trouble getting an image large enough to see Mercury, which appears ~1/200 the size of the sun), or through binoculars (you only need to project through one side, so you can cover up the other one; hold a sheet of paper under the eyepiece -- this works better if you stand with your back to the sun and shade the paper with your body; just don't stand between the eyepiece and the paper, obviously).
Here's the best of the first batch of pictures, taken in the back parking lot at work ~12:30 PM PST. Viewing apparatus is the relatively cheap and low-tech SolarScope (this is what was being shipped to me in the Fedex saga). I also tried projection with binoculars but you really need to shade the thing you're projecting for optimal image contrast, so I wasn't able to get a decent image larger than the size in the SolarScope.
Click for full size (4048x3048, 4.3 MB). The image is inverted, so solar north is down. I thought the thing on the right edge was a dust clump on my lens or something but it turns out to be a sunspot.
This warning bears repeating: DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN, ESPECIALLY THROUGH BINOCULARS OR A TELESCOPE! Permanent eye damage occurs immediately and without warning (there are no pain receptors in the retina, just the blink reflex of the eye)! Use pinhole projection (although you may have trouble getting an image large enough to see Mercury, which appears ~1/200 the size of the sun), or through binoculars (you only need to project through one side, so you can cover up the other one; hold a sheet of paper under the eyepiece -- this works better if you stand with your back to the sun and shade the paper with your body; just don't stand between the eyepiece and the paper, obviously).
Here's the best of the first batch of pictures, taken in the back parking lot at work ~12:30 PM PST. Viewing apparatus is the relatively cheap and low-tech SolarScope (this is what was being shipped to me in the Fedex saga). I also tried projection with binoculars but you really need to shade the thing you're projecting for optimal image contrast, so I wasn't able to get a decent image larger than the size in the SolarScope.
Click for full size (4048x3048, 4.3 MB). The image is inverted, so solar north is down. I thought the thing on the right edge was a dust clump on my lens or something but it turns out to be a sunspot.
