Sun and Venus

This image shows the Transit of Venus across the sun.  The data was taken June 5th at 5:30 pm PDT.  Two minutes of data were taken and processed in Registax.  Photoshop was then used to stretch and colorize the data.  The surface and prominences were processed with masks to allow for different levels of stretching for the prominences and the disk as well as allowing different levels of color saturation and noise filtering for the different features.

A video with a more "artistic" view of the transit showing clouds going across the sun during the transit can be found here.  Warning, this is a large 100 Mb file.