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The transit of the planet Mercury across the face of the sun on May 9th 2016 gave me an opportunity to dig out my sun filter, not used since the partial eclipse of 2015, and have a go at photographing this event.
I didn't hold out much hope of sucess, as the small planet would only be a very tiny disc against the much larger sun, and with my biggest lens maxing out at a focal length of 400mm the image of the sun itself wouldn't be that large either.
But nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I spent my afternoon tea break in the car park of the factory where I work, tripod mounted camera pointed skywards, much to the amusement of my colleagues.
Actually getting the photo proved to be quite a technical challenge, with even a light breeze causing frightening wobbles of the sun in my viewfinder, and at a slowish shutter speed of only 1/30 sec those wobbles caused most of my images to blur.
So I took a dozen or so exposures, using mirror lock up, a cable release and waiting for the breeze to drop before pressing the shutter, of which this was one of two sharp frames.
And guess what? Reviewing the photos on a large monitor, zoomed in to view just the sun's disk, I could actually see Mercury!
Slighty smaller than an adjacent sunspot, the tiny disk is only a few pixels across but I could actually see it.
So it was into Photoshop to boost contrast and definition of what was a very faint feature.
I resisted the temptation to actually 'paint' Mercury onto the sun as a round, black dot, as I think that would be going a bit too far in what is supposed to be a factual photo rather than an artistic interpretation!
Filename - sun mercury transit 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 100-400mm zoom @ 400mm
Exposure - 1/30sec @ f5.6, ISO100
Location - Deeside Industrial Park, North Wales
This image - 800x800px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC
Comments - Sun filter used to reduce brightness
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