Venus - why haven't I done this before?

[Oldfort]

My best views are to the North and East, so an evening Venus is a challenge (plus it would be over central London).  It finally dawned on me that if I  did an alignment on the sun on my goto, then I could find Venus easily in the daytime.  OK this is not premier league imaging, but it's a start (iphone held at lens; 2.5mm Nagler with TV76).

 

 

[Tommohawk]

On 09/05/2020 at 21:13, Oldfort said:

It finally dawned on me that if I  did an alignment on the sun on my goto,

Dont try this at home folks!! As you say it works but care needed - great image for a phone camera!

[Oldfort]

3 hours ago, Tommohawk said:

Dont try this at home folks!!

It's not hard to use the shadow of the scope, by minimising it, to get a decent alignment, with final tweaking using the finder to project a large out of focus image of the sun on to something handy - such as a piece of paper or the telescope handset.

 

[Tommohawk]

3 minutes ago, Oldfort said:

project a large out of focus image of the sun on to something handy - such as a piece of paper or the telescope handset.

Yep, good plan. I was just being a bit nannyy (real word?) in case someone less savvy tried it. 

[Pete Presland]

Nicely captured, a nice looking phase visible there.