Above us only sky: Mercury

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Monday, May 9, 2016

Mercury Transit across the Sun -- continued

Today (9 May 2016) a quite rare phenomenon occurred: a transit of Mercury across the Sun.
Here is an animation of four subsequent frames with an interval of about half an hour between.
A small moving spot is Mercury, other features on Sun's disk are sunspots.

Before stacking, Sun's images were manually aligned (rotated) using the first frame as a reference; angle of rotation was determined by sunspots. Of course, such an alignment is quite approximate.
(Sun orientation itself is arbitrary)

The picture beneath is a result of processing of 5 frames shotted at ~15:03 (UT+2).

ISO=100; F/11; 1/4000s (5 frames of 10). Processing: PIPP (10 frames); Autostakkert2 (5 frames of 10); RegiStax6 (wavelets, contrast, gamma); AstraImage (adaptive filter); FSViewer (rotation, cropping, zooming).

See also time-lapse video of a beginning of the transit:

Part of the video, processed with PIPP+Autostakkert2+Registax6:

Mercury Transit across the Sun

Today (9 May 2016) I tried to capture a transit of Mercury across the Sun.
This is the best picture obtained during the session (I used Canon EOS 600D with EF-S 55-250mm IS II on a tripod. A solar filter was made from BAADER AstroSolar film.
An initial sequence of 60 frames captured between 15:16 and 15:18 (UT+3) was processed by PIPP, then 18 frames were selected manually; 50% of them (9 frames) were stacked using AutoStakkert2. Postprocessing was performed in AstraImage (deconvolution etc.).