I dragged my daughters outside to look at the transit, about an hour before it ended on November 8th. I was very excited to show this to them, and Hannah and Rosie were both excited to see it. Initially I thought we were successful, but after looking at the pictures on Wikipedia I’m now thinking that what we were looking at was a sunspot near the western limb of the sun. There was a large, dark sunspot there, and we did see the dark spot, but only one, not two. Since mercury was much smaller than the sunspot, I’m thinking we were seeing that, rather than the planet.
Next time (2016) I’ll hopefully have a better rig set up than a pair of handheld binoculars and two pieces of paper! đŸ™‚
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