transit – MatP's view of the world

2021-05-05

ISS Transit in front of the sun

On Sunday, May 1st, I was lucky to have the ISS transit the sun only a few kilometers away. Weather played with my plans as well. So i packed my solar scope and drove to a place right in the center of the transit line.
The transit itself is a very brief event. This particular one lasted for less than 2 seconds. So everything hat to be well set up before the clock reached 08:24:22 CEST.

This image is a combination of 15 individual images captured in 1.02 seconds. The solar surface was further enhanced by a stack of 880 frames adjacent to the transit itself.

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2020-11-242020-11-24

Satellite transits Mars

On Thursday 2020-10-22 in the evening, I captured image sequences of Mars (see seperate post). During one of the infrared test sequences (I wanted to compare noise levels at +2C vs. -20C) I saw a brief dark shadow passing the disk of Mars. First out, I thought it might have been a bat. But later on, when I analyzed the video, I found out, that the shadow was a satellite transiting Mars 🙂

The transit started at 2020-10-22 18:27:45.498 UT. The satellite left the disk of Mars at 18:27:45.687. So the duration was a very brief 190 Milliseconds! As I recorded with 178 frames/second, I could capture 27 individual images of the transit.

I definitively was very lucky to have registered the shadow during capture time. Otherwise I would never have seen this event in post processing…

Optics used: 10″ f/5 Newton with 2.5x Barlow (effective focal length was 3125mm)
Recorded with IR-650nm pass filter on QHY183M camera at +2C with 178 fps

2016-05-092019-01-22

Mercury transit

Today Mercury set its path in front of the sun. The tiny black spot was a nice view to observe. As I was in the office that day, I used a tripod, 1000mm lens and a wired remote trigger to capture a few impressions of the event:

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