Mercury Transit in a Nice Notebook

A lot of people ask me what sort of thing would I like to see in a student's laboratory notebook, and this turns out to be harder to describe than you might imagine. Yes, I want to see all the typical experimental setup description, recorded data, and details about experimental method and error analysis sorts of things. But I also like to see some creativity and thought, and maybe a little artistic impression to aid visualization, and links to new creative ideas and perhaps thoughts on the NEXT experiment.....

But there is nothing like a good example. This kid gets an A for his notebook page on the last Mercury transit back in May of 2006.

Original source: Spaceweather

And now you can go make a similar one for the upcoming transit next week on November 8th! Here is an image from the NASA web site that tells you when to be observing, depending on where you are.

Please note that observing the sun without optical protection or filtering is still as dangerous as ever and can blind you, and that there are proper ways to safely observe the sun, including eclipse glasses, using a pinhole projector, using eyepiece projection through a telescope onto a piece of paper, or directly through a telescope equipped with a solar observation filter.