(Posted 9 October 2015) I managed to take the below photograph of Venus and the crescent Moon this morning once the cloud had cleared.
It sort of makes up for the fact that I missed out on seeing the actual Venus occulation due to total cloud cover. Sort of….
I am in Canberra and at 6.55am this morning I saw a huge star in the Eastern sky, a very thin crescent moon was below it to the right, just above the horizon. Would this have been Venus? I took a photo but can’t see how to post it. It was so big and bright, amazing to see.
Lisa,
This morning there would have been two stars to the left and above the Moon. The brightest (by far) would have been Venus. The dimmer star would have been Jupiter. What you described matches the bright star being Venus.
Good to hear from you.
Regards,
Paul Floyd.
Paul,
My wife and I observed Venus with today 11 Oct 2015 from ~1:40pm to 2:00 pm EDT (USA) with “the naked eye” (we both wear prescription eyeglasses), binoculars, and a telephoto lens. The sky was very blue and nearly cloudless. Our vantage point was the south shore of Lake Erie at Willowick OH USA.
With a 45-200mm lens at full zoom, I managed to get a few photos that show Venus as a half-lit sphere. And my wife got one of me taking those pictures. Would you like them for your blog?
“observed Venus XXXX today”
Stephen,
Good to hear from you.
I was really interested in hearing about your observation. I am getting more and more visitors to my website from the USA and it shows how wonderful the world wide web is.
As for hosting your photos, please keep in mind that I don’t have a gallery section at the moment. For this reason, I haven’t really posted that many pictures to my site that aren’t my own. If you would like me to host them, I am very happy to do so. I would need you to send me a reduced version (no more than 900 pixels wide) of each with your name and contact details on them (your email address) so that other visitors to my site can contact you directly if they want to do so. I would post the images in the ‘My Astronomy Blog’ section on my site. I would also need you to confirm in the email that you and/or your wife are the copyright owners of the images.
Another (US) site that you might want to send your images to is http://www.spaceweather.com. They have a proper gallery section for people to submit their images to.
Regards,
Paul Floyd.