Venus, second planet from the Sun, shrouded in dense cloud ~90 times Earth's atmospheric pressure, high in Carbon Dioxide, causing a "runaway greenhouse effect" with ~400C surface temperature. Galileo was the first to discover the phases of Venus in 1610, which helped him postulate a Sun centred solar system, instead of Earth centred. Captured just before a cloud bank passed over - humidity high and atmosphere noticeably unstable. Even with effective focal length at 1920mm, this is not enough, so the image is heavily cropped. It probably needs 4000, even 5000mm. Captured with BackyardEOS 5X Planetary mode - 600 frames @ ISO1250 at 1/20 sec. Processed with Registax 6 with best 20% stacked, no wavelet processing. Post processed with Adobe Photoshop CS5 Telescope - Apogee OrthoStar LOMO 80/480 with Tele Vue 4X PowerMate, No filter, Canon 40D DSLR field 26' x 40' , Ambient 17C. EQMOD EQASCOM with Ascom 6 for mount control. Backyard EOS 2.09 for Image acquisition. Mount - Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro. No Guidescope used.
The Moon, Earth and the Planets orbit the sun in orbits that are inclined within a few degrees of one another. Periodically they appear to pass by one another in Earth's night sky. Here we have Mercury (bottom Left), Saturn (Bottom right) and the 3 day old Moon with its 'dark side' lit up by Earthshine. Just above the Moon is my favourite named star - Zubenelgenubi Post processed with Adobe Photoshop CS5
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