Nearly a month ago,IAS professional group decided to work on some projects for transit of Mercury. Finally these projects were chosen:
1-Photography of the transit with both normal and digital camera.
2-Making some movies of the transit with video ccd camera.
Before the main program we had some practices on photography to determine the exact magnification and exposure times required for photography.
The most difficult part of the program was to chose sufficient magnification and exact focus for photography.
Finally we decided to take photos with two 8 inches telescopes with 800 mm and 1950 mm focal lenghts using eyepiece projection method.
Photos were on ordinary ASA 100 and 400 color films and one ASA 100 black & white film. The result of the projects were satisfying but there were some tiny problems one of them was the intense wind blowing while taking pictures of black drop phenomenon.
As a result, pictures were not sharp and of good quality, anyway we could take the black drop with the digital camera much easier than ordinary cameras.
The professional team was consisted of these members:
Ahmad Reza Karimi
Dariush Zolfaghari
Ali Foroughi
Mohsen Karimi
Elham Sharifian
Maryam Nejatbakhsh