Last night I brought three telescopes and CCD occultation camera to Dargaville High School where I teach. I slept under the stars, being nervous about getting too far away from my computerised Meade SCT. It was its first night to 'sleep' outside and I was nervous about any rain, even though it had sheets and a variety of tarpaulins to cover it. I woke up at hourly intervals from 3pm to 5:30 (when the swim club arrived to train) and admired the incredible fortune I seemed to have with the weather - until about 6am!

My first public visitors arrived at 8 am in gale force winds and I nearly brought the telescope in. I was just about to lose its alignment by bringing it in, when at 8:12 we had a beautiful break in the clouds. Frustratingly, the break wasn't long enough for me to get the three tarps off and get the solar filters weaved up and inside, but I was ready for the next gap and convinced to stick out the rain, hoping it wouldn't get into the scope.

The first class arrived at 9:00, and had to satisfy themselves with animations, pictures, and a brief explanation about the equatorial telescopes I had indoors. The next class arrived at 9:20 and miraculously the rain stopped, although the gale force winds didn't, and we got our first view. The sun occasionally played hide and seek with us, but the next 230 students and another 20 staff and public got to see a 40cm solar projection of mercury, look through the 8" with a Thousand Oaks filter, and best of all - look for the prominence through the H-Alpha.

We have three disabled students at our school. A blind student came along and we demonstrated the event with the yellow ballons and a small table tennis ball. Another student who has no muscle control whatsoever was wheeled up to the projection screen for a close up view. Finally one of my albino student with only 10% vision was able to see colour in both scopes and make out the sunspot in the projection. It was lovely that they weren't excluded.

Despite lots of preparation we were unsuccessful in videoing the egress as the first class of the day showed up for another try, and back came the rain and the clouds. I also found the sun so bright that it was difficult to focus the camera on the TV set - despite that I had predetermined the precise focus. Having gale force wind didn't help, so I'm not sure if the images would have come out that well, but it would have been really nice to get Mercury leaving the sun - especially if there was any chance of picking it up against the chromosphere. All in all though, I can't complain at all. I had several female top students approach me to announce they wanted to become astromers and they insisted on discussing then and there which subjects they needed to take at school to follow this career path!

The senior hospitality students who were catering for the event did a brilliant job enticing the morning visitors out to the venue in the pouring rain. One of the breakfast dishes was a sunny side up egg, with a little currant to represent mercury. For lunch, one of the desert offerings was "Stargazer muffins" - vivid yellow lemon icing with chocolate chips.

It took nearly 3 hours to get my gear into two cars to come home as the skies closed in after the egress. On arrival home I was completely soaked getting from the car to the house. We are reporting gale force winds at the moment, and it doesn't seem any breezier than it was all day. I'm too tired to face unpacking back to the observatory, so that may have to wait until after I've caught up from having slept only a couple of hours last night. As I've seen both a transit of Mercury and Venus before, the highlight for me was to be able to show it to so many people, and arouse so much interest in the event, and the gear.

Pictures