Mercury Transit from Las Vegas, NV. USA

I'm still working on the full animation but I've included a couple stills and a link to a very short animation test that I made of 3rd and 4th contact. Here in Las Vegas, the transit was already in mid progress so we missed 1st and 2nd contact. The planet was almost halfway through the transit at sunrise. I started imaging as soon as the sun rose above my neighbor's house at 6:50am but it honestly didn't get steady enough to animate until around 8am. So I have 2 hours worth of images to process and edit. I've figured out a few automation tricks to speed up the process.

Lunt 80mm Ha scope, ZWO ASI1600mm camera

This first shot is from around 8am.

The complete time-lapse that was visible from our location.
https://youtu.be/YOM2s​xPFqm0

SiriusDoggy wrote in post #18959347
I'm still working on the full animation but I've included a couple stills and a link to a very short animation test that I made of 3rd and 4th contact. Here in Las Vegas, the transit was already in mid progress so we missed 1st and 2nd contact. The planet was almost halfway through the transit at sunrise. I started imaging as soon as the sun rose above my neighbor's house at 6:50am but it honestly didn't get steady enough to animate until around 8am. So I have 2 hours worth of images to process and edit. I've figured out a few automation tricks to speed up the process.

Lunt 80mm Ha scope, ZWO ASI1600mm camera

This first shot is from around 8am.

This image is from 9:58am, about 4 minutes till 3rd contact.

Here's the animation of 3rd and 4th contact.

EMBED PREVENTED, HEAVYWEIGHT DOWNLOAD: 14.53 MB
https://photos.smugmug​.com …accf1/X3/i-kf6JXGD-X3.gif

Stunning work.

Cheers

Dennis

I just came back to comment that setting up and operating 3 different systems is quite an achievement.

The best I ever did was setting up 2 imaging rigs, with my very helpful wife acting as the operator for one of them.

Cheers

Dennis

nardes wrote in post #18960387
I just came back to comment that setting up and operating 3 different systems is quite an achievement.

The best I ever did was setting up 2 imaging rigs, with my very helpful wife acting as the operator for one of them.

Cheers

Dennis

Thanks, it wasn't too bad. I actually set up all three scopes in the garage the day before. Plus a huge checklist of everything I needed to remember to do made remembering everything easier. The 12" was just there for visual so I was only imaging with the Ha scope and the other refractor with a white-light filter. I haven't even looked at those images yet. The sun is just so boring now in white-light. It was my backup in case the script running in SharpCap Pro failed on me.
Once the recordings started there really wasn't much to do but sit back and wait. I was actually expecting more people to stop and question what was going on since it was a weekday and prime time for people headed to work. I only had 3 people stop to question me and only 2 stop and look.

Thanks again for the kind words.
G ~