2016 Transit of Mercury

You can watch online at http://live.slooh.com/stadium/live/transit-of-mercury-2016

This was excellent. Thank you for the link.

I have a rarely-used telescope and decided to drag it to the top of a parking deck downtown to view the transit. However, I only brought about 20x (*edit... confused my 80mm aperture with 400mm focal length) magnification.

Mercury basically looked like a speck of dust on the lens.

That said, there is something about the physical process of amateur astronomy that still manages to make the experience meaningful.

One thing I learned from watching the transit on a YouTube livestream of someone else's telescope view (because New Zealand was in the no-see zone) is that YouTube livestreams have live commenting that works just as good or better than Periscope, and I was chatting with the owner of the telescope.

The only downside is the lack of easy discovery for current livestreams (if there's no special event to search for that people would be livestreaming), which I guess is what YouTube Connect will be all about.