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Venus for the first time


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Hi all

Last night just as the sun dropped below the horizon, I was sat at the patio table and noticed a bright star against a blue sky, I thought....strange to see a star visible in such a light background. so I quickly got the scope out before it disappeared below the garden wall. I popped in a 2x barlow and a 20mm eyepiece, and was shocked to see it was a planet and not a star. Not sure of which planet close to the sun that i witnessed? I looked it up on stellarium, and verified it was Venus. I was chuffed as hell.

Now to catch Mercury sometime?

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Still haven't seen Venus either yet. I believe Mercury is a much harder target, maybe due to it's proximity to the sun and it's small size. Maybe someone will clarify this. Good luck though.

Scott.

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True. But from a personal experience, the lack of details and smooth look stripped Venus from being a worthy target.

yes it is quite boring, but at least you can say you have seen it
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I disagree, it's not such a dynamic target like Jupiter, or as impressive as the rings of Saturn.

But it goes from being very small, to very large and goes through all the phases similar to the moon.

This series of images were taken by me, through the same scope/camera setup, so the difference in size is actually a real change in apparent size.

Venus is well worth the effort, Mercury is MUCH harder.

Cheers

Ant

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Had a similar experience last night. I had been out just after sundown and caught what I thought to be a very bright start burning in the west. Didn't know what it was until I opened up Stellarum. Without a telescope, I couldn't see any phases or details. Just glad to have caught a glimpse.

Mercury is going to be quite the challenge.

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The only time i had seen mercury with the naked eye was when i was in a flight, and we witnessed the sunset. Shortly after, we could see 3 'stars'. Those were jupiter, venus and mercury!

Sent from my GT-S5570 using Tapatalk 2

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I viewed Mercury through my Tal back in the 90s when it was in a really favourable position. Like Venus, there's not an awful lot to look at. I too was excited when my wife spotted Venus on Wednesday night. We went out on Thursday with the 'scope and got a fairly good view of it. It's a bit gibbous at the moment and was quite shaky in the murky haze close to the horizon, plus my little refractor made it look like a disco ball! I checked on Stellarium and there should be good views of it as a crescent later in the year.

DD

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Still haven't seen Venus either yet. I believe Mercury is a much harder target, maybe due to it's proximity to the sun and it's small size. Maybe someone will clarify this. Good luck though.

Scott.

Mercury is certainly quite a hard target. I've only seen it once, on one of it's best apparitions this year, and it looked like a moderately bright star, but it's usually quite faint. Through my 150p, I couldn't see much detail at all, but I think I got it's phase with my DSLR.

post-29419-0-74421000-1374942721_thumb.p

Anyway, nice work seeing Venus!

It's not at it's best this apparition, not like last time, but it's still a cool target

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My first telescopic view of Venus was during daylight back in the 70's. Venus was near greatest eastern elongation and about 50* illuminated at the time. No setting circles on my reasonably well aligned EQ mounted newtonian, so after finding the RA coordinates of the Sun and Venus on the given day (can't remember where I acquired those, but it certainly wasn't off the internet) :smiley: and calculate the time difference between the two. Obviously I could not look directly at the Sun so the method I used was to aim the scope at the Sun as best I could, then get my wife to hold a piece of card a few inches from the 6x30 finder eyepiece while I adjusted both axis with manual slow motions until the Sun's image appeared on the card - I guessed this wouldn't be easy and that proved to be the case, but we got there eventually. All I had to do then was to go for a nice cuppa or two, return to the scope when the time difference had elapsed and scan in declination until Venus appeared in the finder, which thankfully it duly did - big sigh of relief there! Can't remember with certainty but pretty sure that I could see Venus with the naked eye once I knew where it was.

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