Luminous Landscape Forum

The Art of Photography => The Coffee Corner => Topic started by: wolfnowl on June 05, 2012, 12:39:08 am

Title: How to Photograph the Rare Transit of Venus Safely (June 5, 2012)
Post by: wolfnowl on June 05, 2012, 12:39:08 am

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

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

Mike.

Title: Re: How to Photograph the Rare Transit of Venus Safely (June 5, 2012)
Post by: Chairman Bill on June 05, 2012, 06:02:46 am

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

Title: Re: How to Photograph the Rare Transit of Venus Safely (June 5, 2012)
Post by: Justan on June 10, 2012, 11:21:33 am

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

NASA video on the solar transit of venus

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

Title: Re: How to Photograph the Rare Transit of Venus Safely (June 5, 2012)
Post by: Walter Schulz on June 10, 2012, 11:44:40 am

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

Title: Re: How to Photograph the Rare Transit of Venus Safely (June 5, 2012)
Post by: Justan on June 11, 2012, 01:21:14 pm

Quote from: Justan on June 10, 2012, 11:21:33 am

???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

Title: Re: How to Photograph the Rare Transit of Venus Safely (June 5, 2012)
Post by: John McDermott on June 11, 2012, 10:57:13 pm

Reminds me of a game of pong.

Title: Re: How to Photograph the Rare Transit of Venus Safely (June 5, 2012)
Post by: arlon on June 13, 2012, 10:32:33 am

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
(http://www.pbase.com/arlon/image/143831783/large.jpg)