Sky & Telescope - November 2020 - 84

FOCAL POINT by Derek Wallentinsen

My Time
of Transits
Warning: Watching a planet
cross the face of the Sun is
highly infectious!
LAST NOVEMBER 11TH MARKS

84

NOVEMBER 2 02 0 * SK Y & TELESCOPE

or optical aid. After the transit ended,
our small crowd had happy faces all
day long.
Mercury 2006: What a beautiful setting for this one - the Point
Vicente Lighthouse, atop cliffs overlooking the Paciﬁc Ocean north of Los
Angeles Harbor. Numerous visitors
saw the event through my 90-mm
Maksutov, and I captured some ﬁne
images of the planet's silhouette
against the solar disk. It never ceases
to amaze me how tiny a planet is compared to a star.
Venus 2012: Eight years after Baltimore found me in St. George, Utah,
again setting up in a city park with
several instruments. I assigned my C5
SCT to strictly visual observing. Park
visitors came by and enjoyed a look.
Two aspects were most thrilling to
me: the rare privilege of seeing both
Venus transits possible in a lifetime,
and the even rarer sight of the arc of
the planet's aureole through the C5's
eyepiece during the last minutes of
ingress. Sunlight shining through the
atmosphere of another world!
Mercury 2016: Spreading the fever
became my goal. Working as a ranger
at Dinosaur National Monument

p Black-dot fever resulted in this image of
Venus crossing the Sun on June 6, 2012.

allowed me to create and present a
transit program for park visitors.
Discouraged by rain at dawn, I set
up the scopes on wet sidewalks near
the monument's fossil quarry, in the
Utah portion of the park. My blackdot luck continued to hold, with the
skies quickly clearing, enabling 140
people to enjoy the program.
Mercury 2019: I found myself at
sunrise within El Morro National
Monument in New Mexico, with the
transit already in progress. This time
I set up a hydrogen-alpha solar scope
along with my 5-inch Mak. I infected
another generation of rangers while
training them on the basics of safe
solar observing. Fifty people watched
the progress of Mercury across the
Sun, some of us seeing the black-drop
effect at third contact. What a way to
end my time of transits!
¢ DEREK WALLENTINSEN works as a
National Park Service Ranger protecting federal lands and the dark skies
above them. He lives in Albuquerque,
New Mexico.

SEAN WALKER / S&T

the end of a season in my life as an
astronomer. As I'm a "senior" amateur, Mercury's passage across the Sun
on that day may have been the last
transit of a planet I'll experience in
this lifetime.
I savor my two decades of transits,
each of them infecting me with an
incurable condition: black-dot fever.
I've lived and observed in the western
U.S. most of my life, which has longitudinally limited my interval of black
dots to a half-dozen transits. Yet each
event has its unique memories for me.
Mercury 1999: Wichita, Kansas.
With the Sun low in the afternoon
sky, the event would be a short passage, lasting less than an hour. I
hoped for an impressive view, as some
important visitors would be looking
through my telescope. I rigged a small
reﬂector to project the transit image
onto a piece of white cardboard. My
wife and son and a few friends made it
to the event. They were quite intrigued
with the setup and the spectacle. It
was my ﬁrst transit, and I immediately
caught the bug!
Venus 2004: Filled with excitement
after reading up on the history of this
planet's transits, I traveled to Baltimore and set up a TV video system
attached to a Meade 70-mm scope to
easily share the view with passersby
in the city's Druid Hill Park. It was a
foggy morning, and anxious moments
went by: Would it be clear enough
to see Venus? Not only was it plenty
clear, the fog was the perfect density
to dim the sunrise, showing a large
black spot visible without any ﬁ lters
Sky & Telescope - November 2020

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