Location: home patio.
Equipment: Stellarvue SV102 F7 ED doublet on
Venus approaching greatest eastern elongation, which will happen on March 24. Next few weeks is the best time to observe it. Good trick is to catch it during daytime when it higher in the sky.
Very important! One need to be very careful not to point the scope at the sun.
My plan was to do it in the afternoon when our roof blocks the sun. Unfortunately, the weather is not cooperating and the closest to daytime I was able to get so far was yesterday around 18:00. It was near sunset, but the sky was still bright blue.
The Venus was about 40 degrees above horizon. The view was quite steady, less boiling and prismatic colors. Half phase was easily resolved even without filters using SLV 25mm (29x). Stepping up the power without filters did not resolve any additional details.
I had 4 filters to test this session:
Baader Moon and SkyGlow, and Baader Contrast Booster filters cut on glare and flaring a bit but did not improve resolution.
Baader Blue 470nm bandpass eliminated flares and glare and have shown well defined half-disk with jugged terminator and some shading near terminator using SLV 6mm (119x).
Celestron #38A Dark Blue (old Japan stock) seemed to improve the resolution even more, but Venus disk was smallish. I stepped the power up, first to SLV 4mm (179x) and then to SLV 2.5mm (286x). Amazingly, the view was holding and was bright enough even with small exit pupil (0.36mm) and aggressive filter (17% transmission). The shaded area extended farther from terminator, and on top of that at the moments of better seeing I was able to resolve two darker clouds areas on the right and left. I made a sketch to the best of my capacity.
