Solar Transit of Mercury Video
- Telescope: Stellarvue SVA130T-IS with Baader solar filter
- Mount: Losmandy G-11 with Gemini 2 controller
- Autoguiding: No
- Optical Configuration: 0.72 x 910 mm (f/5)
- Digital Zoom: Cropped sensor for 5X magnification. Total magnification = 120X
- Camera: Canon 60Da
- Camera Control: Backyard EOS, Planetary Capture
- Video Loops: 45, 100-frame videos; ~ 20 fps @ 1-min. intervals
- Shutter Speed: 1/3200 s
- ISO: 100
- Calibration: None (no darks, no flats, no biases)
- Lucky-Imaging Processing: AutoStakkert 2 and RegiStax 6
- Post-Processing & Frame Alignment: Photoshop CC
- Video Rendering: iMovie
- Imaging Location: Los Angeles, Calif.
When the Sun rose in Los Angeles, Calif. on November 11, the 2019 solar transit of Mercury was already well underway. And by the time the Sun cleared my house and the neighbor’s trees, there was less than an hour left to go. Miraculously, the thick marine layer of clouds that had threatened to scrub the photo shoot altogether had also evaporated. Better late than never. It was game on! The next transit of Mercury visible from North America wouldn’t be until 2049!
I had decided to shoot a time-lapse using Lucky Imaging to combat the effects of air turbulence at the high magnification needed to resolve the planet, which was only 10 arcseconds wide during the transit. Ten arcseconds is how wide a soccer ball would appear at a distance of almost 3 miles. Mercury is a tiny planet.
Each image for the time-lapse was first shot as a raw 100-frame AVI video at about 20 fps and a shutter speed of 1/3200 s. I shot 45 raw videos at 1-min. intervals. The sharpest 8 frames from each raw video were then stacked into a single TIFF image with AutoStakkert 2 and sharpened further using Wavelets in Registax 6. Each of the 45 sharpened images was processed and aligned in Photoshop CC. The final time-lapse was rendered from the 45 processed images using iMovie.