Carnival of Space #457

Hello all and welcome to a new CoS. Something always happen in space and here you will find what happened in the last week.

We will start with Mercury Transit from last week. What I love about such events is that they are so global. For several hours many people all over Earth watched this event from different countries, Universe Today collected some of the best photos and videos and present them in a single article:

Mercury Transit

Images of Today’s Transit of Mercury From Around the World

One of my own videos is in UT's article and that is always an honor, but If you want more information and details including my photography setup please read my own summary of the transit as well.

Two more articles from UT:

• Will Earth Survive When the Sun Becomes a Red Giant? (My note: It is an interesting question but don't be concerned even if the answer is no)
• Messier 13 (M13) – The Great Hercules Cluster (My note: UT have great series about the different constellation and Messier objects. Pleasure to read)

From Chandra:

• Chandra Movie Captures Expanding Debris From a Stellar Explosion (It is a big explosion)
• Help Wanted: A Universe of Images 

From Planteria:

• New worlds galore: Kepler Space Telescope confirms 1,284 more exoplanets (My note: do you remember the first one discovered? Now there are 1284 and more will be!)

From BrownSpaceman:

• An astronomy guide to help you discover the wonders of the universe. It's a collection of things that got me inspired and more excited about astronomy (My note: A very nice article with useful resources)

Take in mind that next week Mars will be in opposition and as close to earth for the next two years, so grab your chances and aim a telescope to it and enjoy. It will not be as big as the moon, but even if you don't have a telescope you will notice its red bright color easily.

That's all for today. Have clear nights and long days!

Mercury Transit summary

Mercury Transit is a rare occasion on which Mercury pass in front of the sun, a tiny tiny "eclipse".
My setup was like this. I used a Bresser 130N and Canon DSLR to photograph through it, however there was a slight focus problem and there are no good results from it. Another Camera, Nikon P900 was mounted as piggyback on the scope and worked properly and Another Camera Canon SX50 for handheld photos and for the Sunset video below.

My setup for Mercury transit

The beginning was not very promising the entire sky were cloudy and the sun could hardly be seen. However from time to time there was some less clouds and it was possible to see the transit.

Here is my first photo. Notice sunspot 2542 in the middle and tiny Mercury (imagine the Sun as a clock and Mercury is at 11).

Mercury Transit

 And here is another photo in which you can see how Mercury moves.

Mercury Transit

The sky cleared a bit so I put all cameras on auto mode using the telescope and a mount, and left to find a place where I can see the sunset

Here are two videos from the transit. The first one is about 2 hours of the Transit until the sun was too down.

In the sunset videos don't miss 00:40 where two airplanes transit the sun as well!
Here is a general view

Photographing the sunset

And the video.

And just the highlights of the sunset in regular speed (The airplane is in the beginning)

Mercury Transit sunset with airplane

It was a very interesting and unique event!