For once the British weather was not solid cloud for this event (although whispy cloud can be seen diffusing over the video frames). I used an Esprit 120mm APO refractor, a solar filter (of course) and a Canon 450D to take pictures every 30s. I managed to get 295 frames (about 2.5 hours) of the transit before an inconsiderately placed tree intervened. Attempts to catch the last part of the transit (after the Sun had bypassed the tree) were thwarted by cloud. So I caught just over the first third of the transit (see Mercury appearing from the top right of the Sun).
To improve the final results, the raw monochrome frames were colour converted in Maxim using the batch processing function and saved as bmp files (Tiff, for some reason unknown to me appeared black when opened in Photoshop). In Photoshop: the bmp files were then enlarged, auto stretched by using the ‘auto’ function in the ‘levels’ menu and had 2 high pass filters applied to bring out more detail. Windows movie maker was finally used to construct the video using 0.06s per frame. And here’s the exciting result 🙂 …
Try zooming your browser to about 200% to get a better view of this video