Mercury recently passed the Sun, a rare astrological event, which I could’ve captured from dawn (6:57am), 9th November 2006 until uh… well, I can’t seem to be able to Google the exact time, for once.

I stayed up, taking a quick nap (thanks Athena for staying up with me and giving a wake-up call!) I took a stroll around my neighborhood at 6:30am. It was already bright, but I could not find the sun anywhere!

But first, some shots around my place.

Coconuts!

Old cars!

Cranes!

Birds up for the sunrise!

The moon! I used the infrared-modded Fujifilm Digital Q1 with the Seagull 50mm F1.8 Minolta MC-mount lens on the Pentax-mount Hoya 2x Teleconverter with the Hoya R72 infrared filter, shooting with an EV of -2. Yes, they are not the same mount and are loose but I held them together anyway. Equivalent to 600mm, then cropped the sides to 960mm focal length.

In comparison, the Canon Powershot A520 went only this far with just cropping and not resizing.

Dammit, I thought, the sun was hiding behind clouds.

As it turns out, it really only came out at 6:57am.

The sun shows on the Fujifilm Digital Q1!

I could not capture the blip, not even with the Canon Powershot A520 with Hoya R72 infrared filter at 1/2000th of a second, F8.0, ISO 50 (as fast and dark as possible.)

Mercury could only be seen if you had the sun filling up at least 2000 pixels, where Mercury would be one pixel. I wish I thought of somehow getting the sun projected upon a surface which I could then capture in full resolution!

Different apertures make the sun look different; the CMOS sensor makes severely overexposed highlights… black. Stopping down the F1.8 lens shrunk the black part of it.

Areolas anyone? 😀

I then sat at this mamak, which never looked grander in daylight…

…or infrared. The sun flare came from the infrared filter, and cannot be avoided by putting a lens hood since the sun is in the picture too.