Better or worse?

*

Original image borrowed from s.a.a:

Improved?

Increased gamma, contrast and sharpness in PhotoFiltre

Click on any image for an enlargement.

Fame at last?

*****

One of my Venus transit images was selected from the 'Sky at Night Magazine' Hotshots gallery  and made it onto the cover disk. Given that much of Britain was clouded over there wasn't very much competition for my transit images.

Oblate, rising sun with 2012 Venus transit and sunspots.

The inverted date and time-stamp have been cloned, flipped and placed more suitably. The telescope and camera had inverted all the Sun's images. While the time-stamp had remained the correct way up in the camera but inverted relative to the real sky.

Denmark's enjoyment of the Venus Transit was short-lived since most of it was taking place well before the local dawn. I was incredibly lucky with the weather yet again. The last remaining cloud slipped over the horizon as the sun rose clear of the horizon.

As mentioned in the previous chapter I used a Baader Solarfilm, full aperture, home made filter taped to a cut-off, bleach bottle. This fits snugly over the Vixen dewshield. The telescope was a 90mm Vixen F:11 refractor with 20mm no-name Plossl eyepiece. The eyepiece was fitted with Baader Fringe Killer filter. A home made bottle top eyepiece-camera adapter kept a handheld Canon Ixus camera centralised and very close to the eye lens. The telescope was mounted on a Bogen video tripod via the Vixen wedge and rings bolted to the quick release plate onto the pan and tilt head.

All these items except the camera and filter foil were bought secondhand or DIY. An image of this set-up is shown in the previous blog chapter. The entire set-up had probably cost me no more than about £350 a few years ago. The camera was about £100 and is much more recent. Bought specifically for astrophotography. It has a small lens and short zoom range. There are plenty of 80-100mm refractors available these days. Particularly affordable, secondhand ones on the UK Astro Buy-Sell website.

http://www.astrobuysell.com/uk/

Click on any image for an enlargement.