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Mercury transiting the Sun (part 2)

May 09, 2016 @ 23:55 By: gordon Category: Astronomy, Photography

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:

Mercury transit

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.

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