An interesting discovery

Have you ever ended up doing something really cool that you didn't mean to do? Well, yesterday I was playing with my camera and I got the idea to try taking a picture of the sun. See, I've noticed that when the shutter speed is set very high the picture is very under exposed. Well obviously, but I mean REALLY under exposed, even in very bright light. So that's where I got the idea. I just wanted to see what it would look like if I snapped a picture of the sun at the very minimum exposure. So I used my 300mm lens at an aperture of f/45, with a shutter speed of 1/4000 sec, and an ISO setting of 100.
Okay, okay, sorry for the technobabble. It just means really fast, and very little light.
Here is the image I got.
Nothing too spectacular right? I thought so too, until I took a closer look and saw what I at first thought to be just an anomaly, but then I had the realization that it might actually be something real. So after doing some fancy Photoshoping I could better see a small dot of light just near the edge of the sun. "No way" I thought to myself. "That can't be what I think it is, but I'm not sure what else it could be." So I did some research to backup my speculations.
What I found very nearly floored me.






































I captured a picture of Mercury.

I had just done something that's very hard to do. Especialy if it's what you're actually trying to do. Which I wasn't. I had no idea that would happen. Astronomers usually need a lot of expensive equipment to filter out the glare from the sun, or they wait till the twilight hours. This was just a snap shot. A quick one at that. I didn't want to risk damaging the camera, so I was very brief about pointing it towards the sun.

I'm just amazed that it actually shows up.
Here's the enhanced version...

From the positional chart above you can see that Mercury is on the far side of the sun, but it is still within line of site. Being that it is on the far side it's daylight side is pointed towards us. This is why it is visible in the picture. If it were on the near side of the sun then it's night side would be facing us, and the planet would be totally lost in glare. So as it is we are looking passed the sun, at Mercury on the on the other side. Cool huh? I'm still amazed that I took this picture.