Warning! Accidentally looking at the sun through a telescope may cause permanent eye damage! Always use a safe solar filter.

Observing Venus in broad day light

Venus photo taken in broad day light

Enlarged portion

Venus inferior conjunction photo taken in broad day light. 2001/3/28 11:45 EST. Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh. 35mm/f16, 1/250 second, Fuji 800 negative film. 8"/f6 dob + 9mm eyepiece afocal. Hand held camera to the eyepiece.

Warning! Accidentally looking at the sun through a telescope may cause permanent eye damage. Since Venus is close to the sun, you must make sure this won't happen. One way is to place the telescope under the shadow of a house, as I did here:

Place telescope in shadow to avoid eye damage

If what you have is a Dob mount, like I do, here's the trick: make Altitude/Azimuth setting circles! (If you look closely at the super high tech azimuth gauge, you will know which furniture store I frequent...)

Altitude

Azimuth

How to calibrate them? Be creative :-)

Calibrating

You will need a computer to get the Alt/Az of Venus at that moment. MAKE SURE THE TELESCOPE IS STILL IN SHADOW. Orient the telescope with the setting circles. Is Venus in you eyepiece? A little search is usually needed.

Venus was white, very thin, and the arc almost exceeded half a circle. It was quite bright in telescope, I had no difficulty at all picking it up. All time is EST. At the time this observation was made, Venus was only about 8.5 degrees away from the sun, and one and a half day before inferior conjunction. (Pittsburgh weather doesn't look good for the next few days...)

The following images are captured with the Dob + 9mm eyepiece + camcorder. I just held the camcorder to the eyepiece by hand. One thing to notice is strong air turbulence (probably due to the roof of a nearby house) which distorted most of the frames. The most stable images below are selected by inspecting more than three thousand frames(!). Being able to do this is one advantage of video imaging.

	Good frames of Venus

To give you an idea of air turbulence, an average frame is attached:

Happy observing!

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