2016-05-09
For more than thirty years I had wanted to see a transit of Mercury or Venus but each occurrence was met with a cloudy sky – until today, and even then it partly clouded over for an hour or two, making me nervous.
For these photos I used a Panasonic FZ-30 at its maximum zoom of 420 mm. The camera was in as much of a manual mode as I could make it: Focus, shutter, and aperture, all manual. Even at the camera's fastest setting, 1/2000 @ f/11, the sun was bright, very bright. The welder's glass I normally use with direct vision possibly had a strange interaction with the camera, causing distortions, so I hacked a filter from a broken car mirror.
Howzat? Yes, I used an old, flat, car mirror which is aluminized but not coated with opaque paint (saving the car manufacturer a few millipennies per vehicle!) held in front of the lens as a filter. This is not safe for direct vision but is all right with a digital camera that does not send any light towards the eye, instead using an LCD viewfinder, so that only the camera should be damaged instead of an eye if something goes wrong.
Even with this the sun was bright! I had to image an internal reflection in the mirror hack rather than shoot the directly filtered sun because of the brightness. This was accomplished by tilting the mirror slightly and watching for where the reflection would move.
Image quality is not the greatest. It's not apparent if this is simply from an incorrect focus or if the image is at the limit of resolution. See if you can spot Mercury in these photos; it's the tiny black spot that slowly moves across the sun from shot to shot (unlike the tiny black spot that doesn't move, that's a sunspot). Is it real or is it a JPEG artifact?