Venus and the Moon

31 March 2020 and 4 April 2020

Okay, so not a post on deep-sky observing, but still worthy of mention because Venus was high enough and bright enough to be viewable from my back garden (as it is every eight years). To get the best view I had to locate it against a blue sky - which can be tricky if the moon isn't nearby. It was a very pretty sight at 171x, with none of the halo or colour distortion that I often got with the SP-102. On 31 March the phase was similar to that of the moon, but there was no detail in the cloud tops (not that I was expecting to see any.)

I didn’t photograph the Venus/Pleiades conjunction (a fast 300mm lens or one of those RedCat scopes would be better suited for that), but I did get a nice view of it through binoculars over several consecutive evenings.

I also got to study the moon with the 7mm DeLite and it was every bit as good as I’d expected: crisp, contrasty, and a good complement to my other magnifications. On 31 March I had my best ever view of the Triesnecker rille system, with the detail visible through the eyepiece exceeding the stacked image for once.

On 4 April the seeing was good enough for me use the 2.5x Powermate, pushing the magnification up to a whopping 428x. I previously wrote that the DeLite doesn’t have the “wow” factor of the Ethos, but this was definitely a “wow” moment of a very different kind; I’ve never seen the moon quite like that before. The detail visible in Gassendi alone was almost too much to take in. The seeing is consistently better in late summer / early autumn (in my neck of the woods at least), which bodes well for the upcoming Mars apparition.

(Back to galaxies in the next post!)