The photo I posted earlier is a bit small. I downloaded the photo directly from my camera to my iPad and I think it lost some quality in the process. I’ve reprocessed it and some of the other photos to see what I could find.

This is one of the better photos I took:

Inside the circle is a tiny dot that is the planet Mercury. You can click the image to see a larger version.

I managed to take this photo by using my 18-200mm lens fully zoomed, holding a piece of #14 welder’s glass in front of the lens and experimenting with the exposure until I found a combination of shutter speed and f-stop that wasn’t massively overexposed. No tripods, no telescopes, just handheld while sitting on a bench in front of the building I work in. I’m sure this looked very odd to the people walking past, but who cares? They didn’t end up with a picture of Mercury transiting the Sun.

I brought my DSLR to work along with my piece of #14 welder’s glass in the hopes that the sun would be visible at lunch. A small break in the clouds allowed me to capture a bunch of photos, including this one:

I believe the small dot in the bottom right quadrant is Mercury. Or dust on the sensor, but it’s appears in more than one photo taken on different parts of the sensor, so I think it’s Mercury because it matches the maps I’ve seen.