After the disappointing annular eclipse in Hong Kong, finally we got a successful Venus transit in 6-6-2012! I led my students to the observation site, somewhere between Clear Water Bay (清水灣) and Po Toi O (布袋澳) at about 4:30am in the morning. We setup the equipment quick and waited the sunrise. As the transit would start short after the sunrise, we got limited time to get focusing and exposure setting ready.
As expected the angle of elevation was low, clouds ran around and the images on the notebook screen were very dim. We were anxious about couldn’t catch the important moment, the first contact. Luckily, we just made it before the transit! The imaging was successful, although some images were affected by the sky condition.
In the past 3 weeks, I tried my best to rectify the images in terms of details, color tune and brightness. The most difficult part was the beginning of the Venus transit. It was because of the clouds. The alignment point of Registax just failed in tracking. I needed to reject those bad frames manually and tried to use different alignment points in order to get the best possible results. Anyway, I finally created this 150M pixels image! (10,000x15,000 = 150,000,000 pixels) See you 105 years later!
