Transit of Mercury from Ely, Cambridgeshire

[Jonathan]

I decided to chase the weather, drove up to Ely in Cambridgeshire and set up at Wicken Fen Nature Reserve. While I was there I had quite a lot of interest from the public the National Trust staff which was great! I had absolutely perfect blue skies and managed to watch the transit from the beginning until around 17:30 when it clouded over.

I have loads of photos and have been struggling to process them. Registax just doesn't like me for for some reason. I'm hoping I can eventually super impose Mercury's Path across the sun. Could anyone give me some tips as to what software I can use to do this? Or should I stick to Photoshop?

This is just a sample I quickly edited on Photoshop. I was using a Celestron C6 SCT and a Nikon D5100. ISO400 1/500s F10

[MarkS]

Well done for making the effort of travelling elsewhere.

You've managed to get a very nice image indeed.   To superimpose Mercury's path across the sun just use Photoshop with a masking brush.  Any other approach to combining images will end up also showing the path of the sunspot across the sun's disk (due to the sun's rotation).

Mark

[Carole]

Excellent, you've got some nice surface features of the Sun too.

Carole

[Hugh]

Well done Jonathon.  Sounds like a nice bit of unofficial Outreach as well   Hugh

[Kenny]

Wow that's brilliant! Well done Jonathan.

[JohnP]

Very nice indeed - might I ask what filter you were using on scope? Thks,  John

[Jonathan]

Thank you so much everyone for all your kind words! Thank you Mark for your recommendation! I have taken your advice to the best of my ability.

John, the only filter I used was the Baader Solar film. I'll include a photo of my setup below.

[Kenny]

That's awesome. Well done.

[The Thing]

Really good job! Stroke of luck going to that nature reserve.

[Carole]

Well done, that was the sort of thing I was planning to do, but clouds stopped play.  You did the right thing driving to clearer skies. 

Carole

[JohnP]

nice so false colour in ps?

[MarkS]

Fantastic image!  Very well done Jonathan.

I'm glad my processing advice worked

Mark

[Kenny]

Well done, that was the sort of thing I was planning to do, but clouds stopped play.  You did the right thing driving to clearer skies. 

Carole

Another example proving the value of investing the effort into driving somewhere clear. Both my lunar eclipe and solar eclipse photos required hours of driving to 'guarantee' cloud free skies but it was well worth it to see the results.

[RobertM]

What a lovely images of the transit, definitely worth all the effort.

Unfortunately I was 100% clouded out for the whole day (near Shaftesbury) so I could only dream it happening.

Robert

[Jonathan]

Thank you so much everyone! Really wish I could have finished the whole transit.

John, yep it is false colour using Photoshop.