I managed to catch Mercury about 40 minutes after sunset on Sunday evening using the SPC900 webcam with eyepiece projection on the Celestron C11. Below is a crop of a single 0.2sec frame (very pretty!) and then the result of 60 frames stacked and RGB registered in Registax (very plain!). It was approximately 10deg above the horizon.
(http://homepage.ntlworld.com/the_shelleys/Astronomy/mercury_110508_frame.jpg) (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/the_shelleys/Astronomy/mercury_110508.jpg)
Cool Mark - Never seen Mercury image with such a large image scale - actually looks like there is a colour brightening towards bottom right hand edge - not sure if this is real or just my eyes.... :-)
Great image though & you did well to capture it... Just shows what effect Earths atmosphere has on images when shooting low on the horizon. From my garden the lowest I can get in any direction is about 30+ deg...
John.
It's pretty amazing that you managed to get anything considering you were imaging over the whole of the capital. I can imagine how much that image was dancing around !
Mark, I am amazed at the size as well, really good to get it.
Yes, I was viewing Mercury across the London heat haze! I couldn't see it with the naked eye but it was fairly easy to locate in binoculars. It was jumping around quite a lot but every so often there was 10 seconds or so of relative calm. In all I recorded 8 minutes of data at 5 frames/sec.
It ought to look like a crescent - maybe if I deconvolve it with a fairly wide Gaussian I may be able to retrieve some of that shape.
I don't think i've ever seen a picture of Mercury as a crescent before. Well done Mark.
There's an image of Greg's from a while back in the gallery:
http://gallery.orpington-astronomy.org.uk/displayimage-9-1.html
Hey Mark thats a great achievement. I must have a go at Mercury with my SPC900 even if it will be over Crystal Palace direction. It's the only planet (Pluto not qualifying anymore) that I've not looked at through my scope or had a go at imaging properly.
Duncan,
Well, at least you saw it on the moon & mercury public viewing session just over a week ago!
Mark