May 6th - Transit of Mercury Print E-mail

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Tony Buick's picture of the Sun disk with Mercury and a Sunspot. Notice how the Sunspot is not as dark as the disk of Mercury.
On Tuesday 6th May 2003, the society had arranged an all-night observing session culminating the following morning with a transit of Mercury - assuming the weather stayed clear!

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Tony Buick's his novel telescope adaptions while Paul Whitmarsh (no he is taken in the vapours) makes some minor adjustemts to get the best from the transit.
The Tuesday night observing session was well attended. Some twenty people had come and gone during the wonderful clear evenings observing.

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Paul Whitmarsh discusses transit tactics with Jim Mehta.
By midnight the die-hards, Jeff Harries, Mike McRoberts and Paul Whitmarsh, had locked the society observing field gate and moved the cars and the equipment down to the lower part of the field where the glare from the street lights is blocked out. From there it is MUCH darker (the society should go there every week!!). They then had a good look at some deep sky stuff, seeking out many galaxies, nebulae and globular clusters, including M4 and the fabulous dumbbell.

Sometime after 2 o'clock in the morning there was a visit from a curious badger that came to have a look at what they were doing. At 3:20am everyone climbed inside their cars and had a kip. They woke around 5am, and soon were enjoying a breakfast of pork pie and beans washed down with a nice cuppa.

Mike McRoberts and Paul Whitmarsh then did a survey with the PC software and an electronic compass to find the best spot from which to see the transit. This resulted in moving all the equipment and cars.

Tony Buick turned up at around 05:30am with his Celestron followed shortly after by Jim Mehta, Joe Shehan and Alan Picot. Anxiously everyone then set up and got ready for the transit.

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Mike McRoberts captures the whole Sun disk. Just see how small Mercury is in comparison with the Sun!
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Dr Alan Hart managed to get the transit with his setup at home.
They had a visit from a curious fox that turned up to have a look at what they were doing later in the morning and Mike managed to get some shots of it with his digi cam through the ETX (an interesting use of an astronomical telescope!).

The rest of the guys didn't stay long, but Mike, Paul, Tony and Jeff Harries stuck it out till the end and packed up by midday.

Everyone then went home for a warm shower and good sleep after only having had about two and a half hours sleep the whole night.

 
 
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Future Events

Apologies
Our apologies for the lock-out at our last Thursday meeting. We hope we'll be able to re-arrange a date for Alec Boksenberg to give us his talk about "What the Stuff Between Galaxies Tells Us" at a later date.
 
Special Events
From time to time we arrange outings and other special events like these:

Deep Sky Camps

These are held at various locations. Usually we use commercial camp sites, and each visitor will be expected to pay the camp site operator for their own pitch. We'll usually try to arrange for our pitches to be in a group, so you'll need to mention you're one of the astronomers when you book.

Occasionally the Society books a site for its exclusive use, and on these occasions we'll expect all attendees (anyone visiting the site) to contribute to the cost, even if they're not actually camping on site.

Outings

In recent years we have visited places like the Greenwich Observatory, The radio telescopes and historic instruments at Cambridge, and the Herschel museum in Bath.

Open Days

These have usually co-incided with relatively predictable astronomical phenomena like meteor showers, and have included observing, short lectures and demonstrations. The most recent one was in August 2003 for the National Astronomy Week.

Public Lectures & Exhibitions

A recent one of our our exhibitions was our 21st Anniversary Celebration entitled Universe Day, held at St Olave's School in Orpington in 2001 - more than 300 people turned up to see all the latest in local astronomy.

Every two or three years we hold in memory of one of our founder members and chairmen, the Kenneth Budd Memorial Lecture. So far we have held three well attended meetings. The first Kenneth Budd Memorial Lecture, in November 1998 was given by Prof. Sir Antony Hewish, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on pulsars. His lecture was titled "Thirty Years of Pulsar Astronomy", and the second, in October 2000, when Ewen A. Whitaker FRAS gave a lecture titled "Fifty Years with Lunar Maps".

Please always try check the forum for details of the arrangements before the event.