Mercury Transit Lessons Learned

The transit is in progress, I’m taking images, it’s actually all working, so what lessons? I usually do night time long exposure imaging. This is different.

• Set up before daybreak so you can polar align. Did that, check. Just like night time except you’re racing the sunrise.
• Turn the screen brightness on high for the camera. Get rid of the red acetate. Check, did that.
• Cover things in aluminum foil. It helps then to not get hot. Didn’t do this but thought of it to late to go back for aluminum foil.
• Take a dark cloth like you’re doing 19th century photography. Didn’t do this and wish I had. I made so with training of my coat for this. Is hard to see the screen once the sun is up. Having transition glasses that get dark in the sun messages it even harder.
• Take a magnifying glass. Especially if you use bifocals or progressive because you’re going to find it hard to get your eyes up close to focus and even if your camera has zoom on the live mode view you’re going to want more to get good focus.
• Practice before the event with both focus and exposure. Bracket! I get half a check here. I didn’t say up until the night before too make sure I had all the parts. I set to a blind range of exposures that were overkill, but then had most of an hour after sunrise and before the event to tweak that by removing the extremes.

That’s all I can think of now, pictures will come tomorrow.