Astroblog: Last Venus?

Monday, December 19, 2005

Last Venus?

A photomontage of Venus waxing, as always, click on it to enlarge. My latest image is on the far right Venus is rapidly growing in size and rapidly getting thinner. Unfortunately it is also getting closer to the horizon, this image was taken during civil twilight. This may be my last Venus image in this series, as at the end of the week we are off to the beach for Christmas. Much clearer skies, but no place to power the imager, even if I had the room to put the reflector in the car (as it is there will be barely enough room for ourselves, let alone my telescope. By the time I get back, Venus may be too close to the horizon to image. Note that the ends of the crescent are slightly blurred, to to atmospheric turbulence stacking couldn't cancel out.

Here's a Mars comparison too (once again click to enlarge). You can see Mars rapidly decreasing in size. Pretty soon it will be a waste of time to image. Especially with Summer hotting up, turbulence will be getting worse. Hopefully I can get some late night images of Saturn in the New Year.

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 11:33 pm

Comments:

Hey Ian, those sequences are great! It really shows the effect of bodies in different orbits around the Sun.

# posted by

Anonymous : 6:13 am

It does, having Mars waning while Venus waxes is quite nice. I'm really dissapointed I didn't an image on 2/12/05, there was finally a claer ish night, I had the scope set up and wa just about to image as the clouds came over, it would have made the sequence so much nicer.

Again, the historical perspective is nice. The geocentric system could explain the increases in magnitude of planets by adding equants, but the crescent Venus and gibbous Mars absolutely destroyed that explanation.

# posted by

Ian Musgrave : 10:17 am

That is REALLY good! No Venus shadows for a while though.

# posted by

Anonymous : 11:47 am

These are great photos, Ian! Isn't Venus waning, though? I think in terms of the phase waning to "New Venus" then on to a waxing crescent.

# posted by

Tag : 12:06 pm

Yes, both Mars and Venus are waning, what I meant was that Venus is getting ginormous and crescent while Mars is getting smaller and gibbous. I should get more sleep before posting.

# posted by

Ian Musgrave : 1:33 pm