Venus in the afternoon

[nytecam]

In the recent clear [and hot] weather I've been trying to view Venus through my goto scope in the afternoon. Last week I managed to get it in the finder but not in the main scope. I used an orange photo filter over the finder to darken the blue sky - it makes a difference!

Yesterday afternoon the sky was cloudless and deep blue and the finder filter was unnecessary - Venus was there adjacent to the finder crosshairs after a Venus goto! Rather than view Venus visually I wanted to see if I could capture its phase. I used my SX Lodestar-M camera to centre Venus in the frame [see lower image below] then swapped to my £2 budget Tesco webcam with a tiny sensor downloading images to my laptop [see Tesco webcam thread on SGL DIY Astronomer] .

To cut down on the bright daylight I reduced the scope's aperture to a tiny slither [f/40?] via the dome shutter AND so no sunlight fell on the scope! This ensures the cam is not saturated to 'white-out'. I've previously used a card mask over scope with a 50/60mm hole off centre to serve the first purpose.

The seeing was very bad with Venus distorted and jumping around constantly. In the continuous stream of images I captured a few snapshots [upper images] which did indicate a gibbous phase [86% = Cartes du Ciel] - mission successful

Daytime planetary viewing : proceed with caution - the scope should be fully the shade so no sunlight can fall on it during the session!

[Ccolvin968]

Pretty impressive! Good catch!

[nytecam]

Pretty impressive! Good catch!

Many thanks for your interest

[Ccolvin968]

Now I'm even more impressed. I tried doing this today and didn't see Venus at all. I managed to put the scope into the sun (I wasn't looking into it thank god,) and melted the bottom of one of my eyepieces. Lol.

[nytecam]

Many thanks for your interest

= Venus in daylight

[RT65CB-SWL]

I used one of them little Tesco webcams years ago with my Ranger and tested on Jupiter and it worked to my suprise.

They only give 320x160 pix, (and I think CMOS). Still rewarding none the less!

[nytecam]

This must be a different sensor on this Tesco cam as VGA = 640x480p is standard but can be interpolated higher and lower