Mercury Transit Composite
Taken by Alan Dyer on November 11, 2019 @
near Gleichen, Alberta
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Camera Used: Canon Canon EOS Ra
Exposure Time: 1/800
Aperture: f/1.8
ISO: 100
Date Taken: 2019:11:12 22:43:09
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Details:
The main image is a composite of the November 11, 2019 Transit of Mercury across the disk of the Sun, on a day with no sunspots on the Sun. The temperature was about -20° C to -15° C this morning in southern Alberta but the sky was perfectly clear.
This takes in the last 2.5 hours of the 5.5-hour event. The Sun rose at 7:50 a.m. MST this morning from my location in Alberta, Canada, with the transit in progress. But for the first 45 minutes or so the Sun’s image was so distorted from atmospheric turbulence that Mercury recorded only as a fuzzy blur. So images from mid-transit at 8:19 a.m. were not usable.
The 16 images composited here start at 8:32 a..m. MST, at left, shortly after mid-transit, and end with Mercury just beginning its egress of the disk at right at 11:02 a.m., with images for the composite selected at 10-minute intervals. I actually shot frames every 15 seconds for a possible time-lapse, for 700 images in total.
North is up here, with Mercury moving from left to right, east to west, across the Sun above the ecliptic which itself is angled up in relation to the cardinal directions.
All were with the Canon EOS Ra camera in its cropped-frame mode, and taken through the Astro-Physics 130mm apochromatic refractor at f/6 for 800mm focal length, on an equatorial mount tracking the Sun, and through a Kendrick Mylar solar filter. The image is further cropped in processing. The yellow tint to the Sun was added in processing.
Photographer's website:
https://www.amazingsky.net
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