Stardust for lucky stargazers: June 2012

One of this year's most important astronomical event has come and gone. It's been almost two weeks since the event, but only now I've managed to work on the photos and find some quiet time to update my blog.

First and foremost, it's been a wonderful adventure, one that I will always remember fondly.

This adventure starts Tuesday evening, on June 5th, with pretty glum weather forecasts. It seems like the best chance for a clear sky lies about 150-200 km west from Bucharest. There's also a chance the skies will clear at about 150-200 km east. So... what to do and which direction to take. After all, the next transit is in 2117 so... no pressure. My team decides to go west, while the other members of the Bucharest Astroclub decide to go east. I feel like a tornado chaser, only we're chasing patches of clear skies :)

I pack my borrowed equipment (since I don't have a scope of my own yet), my cameras and my tripod and off we go. We leave the city at about 11 pm, just in time to make it to the selected site by sunrise. No incidents on the way, we pick a nice wheat field almost in the middle of nowhere and we set our equipment with time to spare...

By 5.30 am the sky looks clear, but awful winds threaten the sunrise... As it is, the sunrise comes and of course, in accord to Murphy's laws, the event happens behind a thick curtain of clouds... For the next minutes, we're all on edge looking at the sky and hoping that the winds will move the clouds fast enough so that we might actually see something.

As if our prayers were listened to, at about 6.25 am the Sun makes a quick appearance (for a few minutes) and then hides behind the clouds again. I am able to take a few photos, but my settings are off, so they're underexposed... (as you can see). In my defense, it's the first time I've photographed the sun with a filter on and I was expecting an ISO of 200 or 400 to be enough...

06:30:54 am; Corabia, Romania

06:38:50 am, Corabia, Romania

The next hour is horrible for me. With only these images taken until now, I'm almost in a state of panic. All I could think of was that I really needed to get at least one good photo of the transit.

Apparently, someone loves me up there, because in the last half hour of the transit, the sky clears and the sun is waiting for the photo session.

Here are a few of my photos. They're not processed too much... They're also a bit out of focus because the winds were really strong and my mount was not one of the sturdiest...