Venus Transit part two

If you read my previous posts leading up to and including the Venus Transit, you know that I purchased my first digital DSLR camera 6 days in advance of the Tranist. things worked out fairly well and I captured some memorable pictures of this once in a lifetime event. When I was taking images, I had the camera set to record both JPEG and RAW files with each exposure. You can see the JPEG pictures posted here. For the minimal processing that I have been doing with digital pictures, I have been using the freeware program GIMP. In fact, I have not yet been able to even preview the RAW files.  This morning, I decided to search and see if digital RAW files could be viewed and manipulated using GIMP. I discovered that they can, to an extent, by using a secondary program called UFRAW. (If you decide to try UFRAW, you must have GIMP installed first).

Well, to cut to the chase, I decided to open one of my RAW images from the Venus Transit to see the difference...and HOLY DETAILS BATMAN! Below is the only image I have opened so far and needless to say I am now motivated to get to work on the rest of the images from the Transit of Venus. Be sure to click and enlarge the image (and if your browser automatically re-sizes the picture to fit your window, click it again to bring it up to full size).

Again, this was 1/4000 of a second at ISO 100.  Keep in mind that this image has been cropped and converted to JPEG format for presentation here, so there is actually more data than one can see in the above image.  In the hands of a skilled image processor, the results could be even more spectacular.