Halpha:
Below - Full
disk shot including the red hydrogen prominences on the limb
Mercury is the small black
dot in the center of the disk. It is very tiny indeed, only 11
arc seconds across!
Below - A
longer exposure of the Chromosphere that surrounds the Sun
With the overexposed disk
of the Sun blacked out similar to a total eclipse, we can easily
see a ring of spicules as a furry edge on the sun, and the prominences
as firey looking clouds hovering over the limb suspended by magnetic
fields.
Below - 3X
close up of Mercury in the center of the suns disk
Fine mottling on the sun
at this wavelength is due to short filaments of plasma forming
rings and connected chains of darker material.
Below - Mercury
heading off the Sun, heading for the limb
One very nice prominence
is seen on the lower right corner on the limb of the sun. The
"furry" edge is countless thousands of Spicules, which
are small flare like rays that shoot out of the sun constantly
and last perhaps 15 minutes each before fading out.
Below - Mercury
is now moved off the disk of the Sun but can still be seen as
a dark disk (circled)
Another edge chromosphere
shot with the over exposed disk of the sun blocked out. Look
inside the circle and you can see most of Mercurys round shape
superimposed.
Below - A
larger Prominence hovering over the limb on the other side of
the Sun
Would have been nice to
have Mercury pass over this one, you would be able to follow
its shadow much further out past the edge of the Sun!
Below - Our
solar telescope used to image the event, mounted piggyback on
the 10 inch Astrograph.
The four inch Lunt solar
scope seen with the red objective housing is a narrow band, pressure
tuned high resolution instrument, and has served us well in our
solar research endeavors. The camera used is a Imaging Source
DMK51 which was developed primarily for robotic vision and scientific
imaging with high detail.
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