At last: some clouds on Venus for me!

[John]

55 minutes ago, Stu said:

Well, I’ll hold my hands up and say that anything I do see doesn’t match anything I’ve seen here, so I’ll have to assume I’m not seeing anything real....

 

I'm still not convinced that I've seen anything "real". Any similarities between my crude sketch and images could well be purely co-incidence. 

I will try some more sketching because I think it helps the observing process but it will take a few more that have something going on that can be confirmed in images before I'm more confident about seeing Venusian cloud features.

 

[Franklin]

9 minutes ago, John said:

before I'm more confident about seeing Venusian cloud features.

It's a difficult one for sure. I've seen hints of shadows branching away from the terminator on Venus at times and maybe they were clouds, maybe not, but whatever I have seen it's always been extremely subtle and of course the sheer brightness of Venus doesn't help matters.

[Roy Challen]

3 hours ago, John said:

I'm still not convinced that I've seen anything "real". Any similarities between my crude sketch and images could well be purely co-incidence. 

This is how I feel about Venus. I saw a feature that matches a small part of your sketch. It was actually quite obvious to me, so I assumed it must be some distortion in the eyepiece or our atmosphere, or even a suspiciously stationary floater. I was using my FS60-CB and a solar continuum filter! The view was super sharp and not as dim I thought it would be 😄

[PeterStudz]

Interesting discussion. I’ve only been observing Venus for the first time this year. The vast majority of the time during daylight - after dark and  from my garden Venus rapidly disappears behind a damn great tree and then rooftops. I’ve also been recording the phase with my smartphone which has been fun.

I was looking yesterday afternoon (Sunday 4th) using my 200p Dob. Seeing on Venus was the best I’ve had and for the first time I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could make out some clouds details. But like  @John  - I was not convinced that I could see anything "real".

What I saw could be summed up by what @Franklin succinctly describes above as “hints of shadows branching away from the terminator”. But were these caused by clouds or something else? My daughter, who has better eyes than me, could also make them out and she described these well enough without me saying anything. I through that I could also see some extremely subtle mottling on the clouds too. But again, not sure it was anything “real”.

When I looked at and started to process a couple of my smartphone videos (incidentally, I’d annoyingly overexposed theses a tad) you can just make out the “shadows branching away from the terminator” that we’d seen visually. But what are they? I’m not sure.

Edited June 5, 2023 by PeterStudz