You had a lot better luck than the rest of the gang did with the telescope in Hawaii -- the relative humidity was too high! Good luck on more pics. That one looks like an entry for the astrophoto contest. On Monday, December 30, 2013 11:05 PM, Chuck Hards <chuck.hards@gmail.com> wrote: Thanks, Joe. I spent most of the afternoon watching Venus duck in-and-out of clouds and wasn't even sure that I'd be setting up for the shot, but with the sun just about to set, a hole opened-up right where Venus was, and I rushed to get it all set-up in the driveway. I first shot some stills using direct-objective, but the image was too small, so I quickly switched over to eyepiece projection and shot in video mode, knowing that I'd get a lot more frames in the same amount of time. Even so, the seeing was so poor that most of the video frames were throw-aways. I think it's true that video is the only way to shoot lunar, solar, and planetary. The target is bright enough to pull it off, and you get thousands of frames to choose from and work with. The lower native resolution is more than made-up for by frame stacking and super-sharp individual frames. If the weather cooperates, I'm going to shoot Venus again in a few days, and on Jan. 11th during Inferior Conjunction, when it will be only 5-degrees north of the sun. That's as large as it will appear until 2022, 62 arc-seconds in diameter- that's about 1/30 the apparent diameter of the moon! Right now it's almost that large, with the crescent easily visible with the slightest optical aid. A pocket bino, golf scope, or opera glasses will clearly show the crescent. We are in the last few days of Venus as an evening object, until next October. By August, Venus' disk will only be 10 arc-seconds in diameter, one-sixth the apparent size that it is now. It's sobering when you realize that Venus is the size of earth, and so close right now that humans with vision in the top 1% can just make out the crescent with no optical aid whatsoever, in good seeing conditions. You can easily see it in broad daylight if you know where to look. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 7:16 PM, Joe Bauman <josephmbauman@yahoo.com> wrote:
NIIIICE!
------------------------------ On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 7:14 PM MST Chuck Hards wrote:
I shot this tonight from my driveway. One still frame grabbed from a 30-second video with the Pentax K-30 DSLR in video mode. High cirrus, some thin ground fog forming, and high-altitude turbulence. It's a good thing Venus is so close and huge right now. The smallest bino or finderscope will reveal the crescent.
C-6 using eyepiece projection with an 18mm Kellner, on my old Edmund 5/8" shaft mount.
http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii24/JethroTull1958/Venus001_zps934a1ebe....
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