This video represents my first semi-serious foray into the world of video astronomy. On November 15, 1999, Mercury passed in front of the image of the sun. I video taped the event through my friend Phil Beffery's C8 equipped with a broadband solar filter. The video camera was an unmodified SuperCircuits P-23C. Frames were later grabbed off the VHS footage using a Hauppauge WinTV card.
I snapped 47 frames at 1 minute intervals from the video we took, and then did some quickie registration by locating Mercury in the frame by hand, translating the image so that Mercury appears centered, and then cropping it a bit, and making it into an animated gif. The registration is a bit bad toward the end, where Mercury is harder to locate with any certainty, but overall I am quite pleased.
This animation is a guestimation on keeping the sun still, and moving mercury. It looks vaguely right, but it assumes there is no actual field rotation due to the telescope being misaligned, which is almost certainly incorrect. :-)
All materials on this website are Copyright 2001, Mark T. VandeWettering. Permission is granted to reproduce and distribute these files for non-profit, personal use.
Mark T. VandeWettering <markv@telescopemaking.org>