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At 5am Univeral Time on 8th May we got into school and set up our arsenal of observing equipment under a cloudless peach-tinged, Wedgwood blue sky. Lined up were the Royal Society's hydrogen alpha telescope on our new Skywatcher HEQ5 equatorial mount, 3 Meade ETX70s with Scopetronix white light filters, two Sunspotter folded Keplerian projector telescopes. And finally Mr Cripps's Orion ED80 apochromatic refractor ,again on an HEQ5, with Philips Toucam pro webcam feeding into a Sony Vaio laptop and by cable to the school's intranet and then onto the word wide web.
We
acquired the sun in the ED 80 just as a solitary cloud appeared from nowhere and
placed itself over the Sun. A bit of a panic ensued but then
we saw the slight indent of Venus on the Sun's limb. As the webcam
logged an image every 20 seconds and sent it to the web we wondered if anyone
was watching. Over the next 6 hours as we fought to keep the image stream,
we continued to wonder if anyone was watching. Next day we found out
from the website's activity log that five thousand computers from all over the
world were logged on to us. And with over a million refreshes, most of
them must have stayed with us for the whole transit.
We logged 1019 images with only a couple of short runs of blanks as mishaps
occurring.
In the final hour we lost our
video feedback. Two sixth formers had been in charge of keeping the
scope
aligned but had decided that they could kill two birds with one stone and do
some revision for their astronomy exam using other files on the laptop.
Rob managed to kill the live video feed window although the images continued to
be logged on the web. Instead we logged on to our own webcast and
eleven year-olds Jack and Sam manned the controls. They managing to
steer using the 30 second-old still images. Steering is
difficult enough in real time, quite how these youngsters managed this feat is
beyond us. Jack said "We just pressed each button quickly
and then waited to see what happened when the web
image refreshed. Then we knew what to do to keep it aligned". Perhaps it
was a good job that they did not realise that five thousand plus people were
watching their every move!
Meanwhile other, more lofty, organisation were having problems of their own. We had a computer room set out as 'Mission Control' with 23 monitors labelled up for webcast from around the World. Many of them failed to appear or soon went offline. The student controllers rapidly had their stations tuned into the few remaining feeds. And, at the risk of immodesty, few beat us for resolution.
Click above to see our images of the four contact points