K3's Astronomy - Venus Transit
"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have set in place, what is Man that You are mindful of him?" -- Psalm 8:3,4

Venus Transit (08.06.2004)

This is only a hint of my results. I am still processing captured material.

Note about time measurement:
I adjusted my digital camera clocks (manually) according to radio controlled clocks. My notebook was adjusted a few hours before starting observation using internet atom time server. I suppose the precision better than 1 second.
Exact time of camera exposures was imported from EXIF information included in each JPG camera image (this is the new feature of K3CCDTools 2.1).
The time of AVI frames was taken from log file (again a new feature of K3CCDTools 2.1).

Weather:
Unfortunately, weather was not cooperating well. In about half of Venus transit clouds appeared and sometimes they made it impossible to take any photo.

Venus transit sequence


Click the image to see picture with higher resolution (3.19"/pixel).
Venus transit sequence
08.06.2004, 07:20:06-13:40:20
(05:20:06-11:40:20 UT)

Resolution: 4.38 arcsec/pixel
Camera: Nikon Coolpix 995, f=31mm
Telescope: 80mm F5 Refractor, 25mm eyepiece afocal
Filter: Baader AstroSolar™ foil sun filter
Result focal length: 496mm (~60X Zoom)
Result focal ratio: F6.2
Exposure: 28x 5x 1/1000s (ISO100, auto white balance)
Camera control: K3Nikon software
Processed by K3CCDTools 2, then in K3APEX


The period between Venus positions is 10 minutes. Missing positions of Venus were caused by clouds :-(, which disabled to take pictures at proper time. After appearence of clouds I was forced to take exposures during clear sky, so some positions of Venus are not exactly in 10 minutes period.
It's interesting to see a track of group of sunspots in the center of Sun's disk, which is casued by Sun's rotation.

Processing notes:
1, 5 exposures were taken each 10 minutes. Finally I had 28 useful groups of frames
2, To ensure the best picture sharpness (the telescope was only cheap achromat), I used only green channel using Green Input Filter in K3CCDTools 2
2, Each 5 frames group was separately aligned and stacked in K3CCDTools 2 (+histogram postpocessing, gamma 0.70, unsharp mask (2,0,100)
3, 28 result pictures were loaded in K3CCDTools 2 and were aligned
4, The result was stacked by using the new K3CCDTools 2 "If Darker" stacking method




06:53 UT


10:55 UT

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Last Update: 15.06.2004