Mercury Transit of the Sun Coming May 9, 2016

Venus transit of the sun June 5, 2012

There will a a transit of Mercury across the face of the sun, as seen from earth, on May 9, 2016.  This article on timeanddate.com can tell you when the mercury transit may be available from your location.  It also provides links to information on proper eye protection!

When the planet Venus was scheduled to pass in front of the sun in early June 2012 I wanted to capture the event, but I didn't want to simply record a dark spot in front of a bright one.  So I decided to place earth-bound objects in front of the sun to capture the Sun, Earth and Venus in the same shot.  And why not... the next opportunity to capture a Venus transit across the face of the sun wouldn't come for another 105 years!

My setup for the Venus transit enabled me to shoot it at 400mm:

• Canon EOS 5D Mark III 
• EF 70-200mm f.4 IS L lens 
• 2X III Teleconverter
• Solar film for photographing the sun

Since I was including foreground objects but wanted to catch Venus and the sun as well, depth of field was a concern, so exposures were captured at f/32, 1/500 second, ISO 200.  That's with the solar filter reducing incoming light.

The setup I'm considering for the Mercury transit will enable me to shoot it at 640mm effective:

• Canon EOS 70D 
• EF 70-200mm f.4 IS L lens 
• 2X III Teleconverter
• Solar film for photographing the sun

This time I'll may track the sun and go for a composite photo showing the path of mercury across it.  In that case I could use an f-stop like f/11 to reduce any image softening from diffraction, so something like f/11, 1/2000 second, ISO 100.

Be careful if you try to capture photos of this event.  The sun can fry your sensor, so don't leave the shutter open in live view for long.  

I'm going to go get a camera or two set up and focused now!

"After centuries of trying, only photographic technology could measure the ‘Transit of Venus’ and tell us our position in the solar system." - +Royal Observatory Greenwich

Anticipating Sun and Moon Alignments

Originally posted in 2010, I occasionally bump this forward in my blog to tell people that they can plan to take an amazing sunrise moonset or sunset moonrise shot on an upcoming date.  As I update this on September 17, 3013, here on the California/Nevada border the moon will rise at 5:50 pm tonight and be about 12 degrees up in the eastern sky at 7 pm sunset.  Somewhere with something tall to place the moon next to should work well, like Yosemite Valley.

Tomorrow the moon will rise around 6:25 then be about 5.8 degrees up in the sky at sunset (close to 7 pm).  That will work best somewhere with a relatively low horizon.  These times will vary by your specific location on the globe, and the application described below can correct the times for your position.

I used to line up moon shots the old-fashioned way... looking up the full moon rise, arriving and seeing where the moon was emerging, predicting where it was going, and changing my position several times to try to be in just the right place at just the right time.

Fortunately there's an application that takes a lot of the guesswork out of lining up the sun and moon with natural or man-made objects to take stunning photos. The application The Photographer's Ephemeris allows you to plan a shooting location for a fairly exact alignment with particular landmarks: Free Download for PC or Mac

It runs on Google Earth satellite photos, so you can easily see your planned shooting position, it shows you the azimuth angle (compass direction) of the sun and moon at any give time from there, and you can read the elevation angle as well.  If the lineup isn't just right as the sun or moon is coming over the horizon, you can adjust your shooting position (at various times and stages in the sun or moon rise) to get just the alignment you want.

View the tutorials for some examples of the capabilities of, and applications for, this program.
Tutorials: stephentrainor.com/tools#tutorials  You'll be surprised at just how easy and intuitive it is.

Below are my results from researching on TPE a much more subtle event: anticipating and planning for the position of a crescent moon. I identified two positions a couple of blocks apart for two different times, then adjusted my position a few yards onsite to place the moon beside or behind the same courthouse, while avoiding trees or power lines.

So fire up TPE and go give this a try in your area on the next full moon rise (and set), or whenever!  Let me know how it goes.

 Remember to pick a target reasonably far away (say 1/2 mile to several miles) to put the moon alongside, so you can use a long zoom lens and capture the moon appearing really large beside it.

Western States Photography Tour: Grand Teton National Park

Fishermen try the Snake River at Schwabacher's Landing.

The view from Signal Mountain in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.

I arrived before dawn at the Oxbow Bend viewpoint in Grand Teton National Park. A number of cars were stopped to watch a moose browsing on the side of the road. I pulled over across from him but stayed in the car, as he was not far away. Then he decided that the bushes looked much better on my side fo the road, and he crossed right in front of my parked car! He proceeded to feed on the bushes next to my passenger side window. He looked up briefly as I rolled down the window, then continued on with his business.

After a while he worked his way down towards the Snake River, oining his mate there. I was able to position myself downriver to get the Tetons in the background, just as the day's first light was reaching them.

This is the standard view from the vista point. Not bad, but compare this the following shot, taken from just down the slope!

Getting here requires climbing over the viewpoint retaining wall, and scrambling down a steep path to a small clearing in the trees about 50 feet below the viewpoint. Working a little harder to get just the right angle, you get much more of the river in.

I blew it on the camera settings here, leaving the ISO at 800, which I had used in pre-dawn light. I set the aperture correctly at f/22 for depth of field and the shutter speed ended up being 1/80th sec. Unfortunately there was way too much noise in this shot to have it ever make a good enlargement. This copy of the file is fine since I reduced the resolution about 9X (3x in the vertical and horizontal directions).

If there's another thing that seems a bit different in this view, I rotated the camera to level the plains below the mountains. There are enough off-vertical trees in the foreground to make it plausible, but to me the mountains getting smaller towards the real vanishing point off the left side of the picture seem to provide enough visual clues to give it away, and make the orientation not quite feel right.

The Mormon Row barns are another popular place for dawn shots at Grand Teton National Park.