Yesterday this was brought up at the Faac astronomy club meeting. One of the members posted he went out after the meeting and saw Mercury.
Today, I knew it was partly cloudy and cold out but I wanted to venture out and look for the planet. I chose the taco bell parking lot near the mall in Allen park. The mall on the hill between outer drive and Oakwood avenue, near Southfield freeway. The location gave a good view of the setting sun.
As the sun set it looked like the following
After the sun set I saw Mercury above the clouds near the horizon. I could see the part of the disk illuminated by the sun. It was cold out and I rushed to the site and didn't dress up warm enough to be comfortable standing out in the cold wind for long. I was rushing which is not a good thing to do when observing.
I tried to take a photo through the eyepiece but it didn't turn out very well. I thought it registered but was blurry. I took a few wide shots but didn't steady or setup the camera very well. I kind of rushed through it due to the cold weather.
Below is a wide shot from the canon eos camera showing Mercury's position. Mercury was about 12 degrees above the horizon when I took this photo.
As you can see i zoomed in a bit with the camera a bit.
My new Blogpress iPad application software allows more than one photo for a blog entry, so I'm taking advantage of this now with a few photos.
Below is a screen shot of where Mercury was after the sun sat according to an app on the iPad called star walk.
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Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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