How to image Venus

[Maideneer]

In my part of the world, daily set time for Venus is 7:30 pm.  You should see the mad dash I make from work at 5 pm to get back to my place and set up, it's almost comical.  I attempted to do this yesterday with ridiculous results - no polar aligning, no filters, snapping 200 frames at most because of drift, processing turning out terrible, you name it.  Obviously I know I'm engaging in the world possible practices, but see...I don't have until 7:30 pm.  I have until about 6 pm as I have many trees in my way to the S/SE so I'm also fighting my way through those.

If I was to do this properly, can someone give me insight as to optimal settings based on my equipment (gain, capture speed, etc)?  What I did notice last night was that as bright as Venus is at the moment, it appears just half of Venus is visible with the other half in darkness at present.  I'm imagining a low gain as it's very bright.

My saving grace is that I do have a flip mirror but as I literally just received it the other day, I'm still figuring it out as to how to focus correctly so that when I do actually flip the mirror, the object appears focused in both my EP and on my PC screen...not sure that's possible.

Any advice helps here!

[The Lazy Astronomer]

5 hours ago, Maideneer said:

I'm imagining a low gain as it's very bright.

Actually, the opposite 😁

I took the advice of @vlaiv  which is to ignore the histogram, use high gain, and very short exposure (around 5ms) to take 1000's of frames. Individual frames will look terrible but the stacked and sharpened result is very pleasing indeed (seeing conditions allowing).

Never imaged Venus though, so I'm not really sure what sort of detail is visible (if any?) in the cloud tops. 

[vlaiv]

Venus does not have any appreciable detail in visible part of spectrum - it just looks like "milky" marble - and only thing you can see is phase.

I only ever did one image of Venus:

That is about all you can get out of it unless you use UV filters. In UV filters you can distinguish cloud formations.

For example - see this work:

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/626565-venus-in-uv-light-on-july-1-7-and-19/

 

[Ibbo!]

For cloud top detail I have gone the IR -UV/IR -UV route, using a RC scope.

Hoping to get another go once Venus gets a bit higher again.

 

These others were with no filter through a refractor.

 

 

[IB20]

51 minutes ago, Ibbo! said:

For cloud top detail I have gone the IR -UV/IR -UV route, using a RC scope.

Hoping to get another go once Venus gets a bit higher again.

 

These others were with no filter through a refractor.

 

 

That is an incredible image 😮

Edited November 16, 2021 by IB20