Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Transit of Mercury

Transit of Mercury

Original - The Historical Transit of Mercury on November 8, 2006. Please note that sunspot #923, which is just below the equator at the left-hand side, is much bigger than Mercury is. You could also see two more sunspots at the right-hand side at the equator. You could see Mercury as a small black dot in the lower middle of the solar disk. Limb darkening is clearly seen at the image. The picture was taken with a white filter and prime focus

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Reason: Great EV, very good quality image of a rare event
Articles in which this image appears: Transit of Mercury;Limb darkening; Discovery and exploration of the Solar System
Creator: Mbz1

Support as nominator --Mbz1 (talk) 21:21, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Support. High EV in the first two articles. Rare and beautiful. -- Avenue (talk) 22:09, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Support. There is something a little bit awesome about this. J Milburn (talk) 23:18, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Support But no promises I won't make a better one in 2016 ;-) Jujutacular ^T · C 17:38, 14 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Support Good EV. A very nice shot considering it was not taken by NASA equipment. --Muhammad(talk) 05:58, 16 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Support Good EV. Beautiful. Elekhh (talk) 05:42, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Support per nom. Durova⁴¹² 23:13, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Would have been better with an H-alpha filter. And I'm a bit suspicious about the granulation, as there is underlying posterisation in the picture. Makes me wonder what kind of postprocessing went into the image (not that postprocessing astronomy images is in any way unusual, but please document it!!). --Dschwen 16:19, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, let's first talk about the granulation. Please see:It seems that largest currents of gas and heat generate myriad smaller ones and these manifest themselves as the granulation we can see in white light and H-Alpha. So I assumed it was granulation, but I do agree with you that it might be not, so I removed the mention about granulation from the caption.

About H-Alpha filters. Maybe better maybe not. For example here are few images taken with H-Alpha [1];[2]. Are there any more encyclopedic than mine? Here's the image that was taken by my friend, a very nice person, and one of the best solar photographers. He used Calcium-K filter that reveals the bright magnetic froth around sunspots and between solar granules: [3]. It is great image of the sun and the sun features, but Mercury looks pretty much the same as it is at mine (much worst :( image).

About postprocessing:Not so much really. Here's the practically original image that was BTW selected from few dozens images to be published at NASA site. When I uploaded this one here, the editors complained that the color of sun does not look natural, so I adjusted the colors. Of course in reality the sun is white.--Mbz1 (talk) 17:25, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia has an H Alpha image of the sun: de:Datei:Son-1.jpg. Papa Lima Whiskey (talk) 22:36, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I know. Wikipedia even has some SOHO images. Even I uploaded few images of solar prominences like this one for example that was taken with H-Alpgha: File:Solar prominence 1.jpg. I do have a small solar scope with h-alpha filter, and I enjoy watching prominences and solar flares with it, but I cannot get really good images with it because I could only use so-called afocal method of photography. With my other scope I am using prime focus. Of course the nominated image is not the best image of the sun on Wikipedia, but it is the best image of Mercury transit on Wikipedia, and the scope of the nomination is transit of Mercury.--Mbz1 (talk) 23:11, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted File:Mercury transit 2.jpg --Makeemlighter (talk) 18:50, 21 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]