Looking for Mercury

It was a crystal clear day yesterday, Saturday, and so I decided I was long overdue to go observing out at Custer Institute in Southhold Saturday night.  I got an email from a friend in the astronomy club and she wondered where a good place would be to go see, just after sunset, the planet Mercury and the Pleiades as the sky darkened, and before they set.  So I did some checking and found a beach in Southold that would give a view down Long Island Sound that would work.  So we decided to ride together to the North Fork.  This is Grace with binoculars, trying to find Mercury and the Pleiades.  We both had cameras set up with telephoto lenses, but we couldn't see our celestial targets.  But as it got darker, we did manage to find them first in our binoculars, and then with our telephoto lenses.  They were very hard to find, which is unusual for Mercury because it usually is brighter.

So you are going to look at this photograph which appears to be of nothing, and you are going to say "THAT is what you were looking for?"  Yeah, well, if you are an astronomer, a thing like this is pretty cool!  After we managed to get our photographs, then we went to Custer and spent three hours looking at galaxies and star clusters with one of my telescopes before heading home after midnight.  All in all, a great day in astronomical observing!  Please click on these photos and you will see more detail.