viewing Mercury and Mars at Sunset.

Four Faac members viewing two planets which were close together on February 9th.

Facing away toward the sunset is Rick Arzadon, James French, Steve Uitti and Tim Dey.

We were using wide field setups. Which included the BT-80 binoculars, 10 by 50 binoculars, my homebuilt f4 four inch reflector, and Big Bertha a ten inch f5.35 newtonian with a 60mm eyepiece.

The views through the big telescope and the BT-80 binoculars were qt nearly the same power 26x.

Nobody noticed the 3/4 phase of Mercury during our viewing.

Later we looked at the ISS, International Space Station as it passed overhead.

This photo was taken with a Canon EOS t1i. The inset photo was an focal handheld shot of Mercury and Mars taken through the bt80 binocular. The focal shot is blurred q bit from movement as it was handheld. The wide field shot only shows the brighter Mercury.

Click on the photo to see a larger version of it and zoom in to see the area where the planets were last night.



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