How to Photograph the Rare Transit of Venus Safely (June 5, 2012)

[wolfnowl]

Or you could wait 105 years or so for the next one!

http://www.space.com/15986-venus-transit-photography-skywatching-tips.html

Mike.

[Chairman Bill]

Chance would be a good thing - typical British summer; rain, clouds, more rain, still cloudy, with more rain promised.

[Justan]

???Crikie, what f stop do you use to do this???

NASA video on the solar transit of venus

http://www.wimp.com/venustransit/

[Walter Schulz]

Do you wonder which aperture was used to reduce the light from the sun?
That's not the way sun photography is done. You have to use filters to block most of the light or the concentrated beam will damage the telescope and sensor.

Ciao, Walter

[Justan]

???Crikie, what f stop do you use to do this???

NASA video on the solar transit of venus

http://www.wimp.com/venustransit/

The videos and images displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light. 304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.

from: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010900/a010996/index.html

[John McDermott]

Reminds me of a game of pong.

[arlon]

Safely? Best suggestion from me would be to use enough ND filter and then use live view to focus. I shot the transit with a 9 stop filter stacked on an 8 stop. I then used live view to focus on venus. I would not look through the view finder because I think there are just too many bad wave lengths being focused that the ND filter doesn't affect. DOF had the sun slightly out of focus. I was planning to do a sun focus too but clouds covered me up after my third shot. I got about a three minute window to make a shot.. )-:}  Shot with D800E in Live view, Nikon 80-400mm VR lens at 400mm, ISO 400, F10, 1/500s.

The best shot I saw (not mine) used a single 8 or 9 stop filter, ISO 50, 1/8000s, don't recall f stop or lens. Shot was very nice though.

I know this info won't do anyone any good for a venus transit but it still might be fun to play with imaging sun spots and such.

mine