Crescent Venus

Session name: 20070811.1030

Crescent Venus snapped in the morning sky with a Nikon Coolpix 995 coupled to a Tele Vue Ranger (TVR) and Tele Vue plossl 20 mm eyepiece.

A short session from Drip Rock where I started with the Sun using the Takahashi 22x60 bins. Detected one small sunspot in the upper leading quadrant of the solar disk after some effort. Otherwise, would have thought that the disk was blank of any activity.

Spent some time hunting for the waning crescent Moon with no luck. I thought there was a chance with 16° elongation and 2.0% illuminated disk. Charlie and I exchanged emails earlier in the week about catching the rising last crescent but slept in not checking the weather for this morning. It may have been a cooperative sky. When I awoke the skies looked really clear and I could see very far across NJ to the horizon. Yesterday's rain washed the haze from our skies. I'll check his blog to see if he reported anything.

Abandoning any further effort on the moon I moved onto Venus. Simply aligned the bins on the Sun and then used the scaled markings on the geared Bogen 410 tripod head to measure off to Venus. Voila. First shot and there was a striking upside down, crescent Venus about 12° below the Sun. Continued to observe in the Tak bins, hand held 7x50 bins, and then the TVR with 32mm plossl eyepiece. Lastly swapped the 32mm for the Nikon setup and snapped some photos.