Monday in Nature, 11 November 2019

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Ephemeral waterfall, Zion Canyon, Utah, USA:

Remembering the colorful fall in Montreal. There was beauty everywhere.

This morning's mercury transit of the sun. Taken at 8:58 AM MST, Canon 5D IV with 100-400mm zoom at 400mm and solar filter, 1/640s, ISO 640, f:7.1, hand held. The diameter of Mercury is only about 9 pixels on this cropped image. I tried visually looking through my unmounted solar filter to see if I could detect Mercury, but could not.

David,

What equipment did you use to capture Mercury's transit in the No Words, Transit... forum? You obviously have higher resolution in your image than I do, since mercury is more clearly defined as a circle. I probably could have done better if I had set up my telescope (2,000mm focal length) with camera and solar filter attached, but I was dissuaded by the outside temperature of 17 degrees F at sunrise.

What equipment did you use to capture Mercury's transit in the No Words, Transit... forum?

I've posted the info on the image in my portfolio. The simple answer is that I cleaned it up a bunch in PP, so that the image reflects what I was seeing directly through the telescope. This was my very first attempt with the D810 on the Meade 114mm diameter reflector, using a T-mount and 2x Barlow, and I was having a terrible time achieving and maintaining focus with the camera mounted, while we had an excellent, clear view directly through the eyepiece. So, I processed the digital RAW image to more closely reflect what we were seeing, including cleaning up the smudge that was Mercury's disc. Other PP included a heavy crop, sharpening, exposure value, black value, and noise reduction. I can state without hesitation that the final image closely represents my view directly through the eyepiece of the telescope, but that achieving this required quite a bit of manipulation. I'm not sure the level of manipulation would allow me to post the image in the Nature forum without at least a little bit of a guilty conscience.:oops:

For a great photo of Mercury's transit of the sun see today's Astronomy Picture of the Day at

Apod.nasa.gov