Further to the
Conjunction effort 2 days earlier and with Venus still less than a degree from the edge of the Sun, our big fellow Mats (9) and myself were looking at the blue sky yesterday and wondered what might be achievable if the "occulting bar" was replaced with a solar filter held some distance away from the objective. I had a 6" full-aperture Baader filter for my RC, which seemed suitable for the task of casting a sufficiently large "umbral" shadow onto the little Tak's objective about 5m below. The setup was as simple as they come - put scope with camera attached in shadow of solar filter, remove cap & press shutter release. I was the filter holder, Mats the shutter release guy, so image credit goes to him. The result is a picture the likes of which I don't recall seeing before:
The Sun (with detail) & Venus, in one single photo.
The only adjustments to the single frame(s) were to brightness & contrast levels. No stacking, no composites, no differential processing within the frame. Of course we actually took a whole heap of photos, and basically all of them show the same thing. After seeing it in the FS60's photos, I decided to attach the FC76 objective for a bit more reach.
We're pretty stoked with this.
Future efforts will involve clean optics and sensors and purpose-cut Baader film. This will do us for now for proof-of-concept though.