For those that missed it, [back in November Mercury passed in front of the Sun](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/e0xptf/a_55_hour_time_lapse_i_made_of_mercury_transiting/). This may be a few months late, but with school cancelled due due to COVID-19 I've got plenty of time to work through my backlog of space images. I had hazy high clouds all day, but [some heavier clouds prevented me from getting ingress of the transit](https://i.imgur.com/kA9Mcqe.jpg). Throughout my timelapse linked above, I did a couple of overexposed shots which show prominences around the edge of solar disc, and I decided to blend it with a composite of my normal time lapse images to make a high dyanmic range shot. Captured on November 11th, 2019, from my apartment roof.

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**[Equipment:](https://i.imgur.com/MqTAyLN.jpg)**

* Coronado PST (Focus tube shaved down to allow for prime focus photography)

* Orion Sirius EQ-G

* ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

* A rat's nest of cables

**Acquisition:** (Camera at Unity Gain, 0°C)

* Exposure- Set to autoexposure in Sharpcap (ranging between 0.5 and 2ms)

* 500 frame video captured with a 1 minute gap between videos for the entire transit.

* **Captures spaced ~20 mins apart were selected for this composite**

* Capture from 7:44am to 1:06pm (Due to heavy cloud cover I was unable to capture the transit Ingress)

**Capture Software:**

* Captured using of Sharpcap and [N.I.N.A.](https://nighttime-imaging.eu/)+ EQMOD for mount control

**Photoshop Processing:**

* Batch stacked the best 15% of frames in Autostakkert!3 with 2X resample and autosharpened

* Sharp stacks spaced ~20 mins apart were selected for the composite, as well as an overexposed shot at maximum transit

* Stacks taken into photoshop and manually aligned using the max transit/ingress/egress frames for alignment

* Mercury was masked out and the rest of the solar image was deleted for each stack (except for max transit stack, which was used as the photosphere image in the composite)

* All mercury stacks merged with Photosphere background stack

* Photosphere image inverted and then blended with Prominence image using 'Difference' mode

* Mercuries were manually selected and inverted (to yield black Mercuries instead of white from the inversion above)

* Levels adjusted to darken the Mercuries further

* Photosphere and Prominence layers merged, converted to RGB (still monochrome image), saved as .TIFF

**PixInsight Processing:**

* Monochrome image colored via [Curve](https://i.imgur.com/3tsT2q1.jpg)Transformation (Note: this is a false color image. My camera can only output a black and white image. The actual Hydrogen-alpha line that the telescope lets through is a very deep red.)

* More curves used to brighten an off-center dark area on the photosphere (with several range masks to fine tune tweaking)

* The gradient is still *kinda* there but this is much better than it was initially

* DynamicCrop to remove stacking artifacts on the edge of the image

* Resample to 95%

* Annotation