These two images taken 85 minutes apart show Mercury's slow passage across the face of the Sun on this warm November day in Connecticut. I made no special effort to get good pictures and it shows. I just used a hand-held Canon camera at the eyepiece of a small solar telescope and took some pictures, hoping that the alignment and focus would be good enough to get a few usable images. At least I captured the small dot of Mercury's disk moving from right to left. Soon after the second picutre was taken, the clouds came in and no more of the event could be seen from here.

Note that no sunspots are visible on the Sun's surface. We are in a solar minimum of the Sun's 11-year cycle of activity, and sunspots will probably continue to be scarce for the next year or so.

Image details: Taken with a Canon Elph camera through a Personal Solar Telescope using eyepiece projection with a 26-mm eyepiece.

November 11, 2019