by Bob Czerwinski
Thanks for the msgs. I´m glad you got to see it at MB.
And David Kingsley had written:
Thanks for the interesting post Bob. Your report inspired me to try your same strategy Saturday evening June 5th at Montebello around sundown. [snip...] About 7 or 8 minutes later, a very thin crescent Venus appeared in the field and view, and remained clearly visible for about 4 minutes before it too was obscured by trees. Rich N. and Marek confirmed the view. We all agreed this was likely to be as close as we get to come to the Venus transit.
I hadn't tried looking for Venus since May 29th, but I, too, was inspired by Joe-Bob's OR. To that end, I tried something a bit different. Late in the morning on Saturday, June 5th, I took my 10-inch f/6.3 SCT (acquired in the mid-1980's, and later outfitted with a DSC arrangement) out to the front of my San Jose home, leveled the tripod, aligned the SCT setup with a compass, replaced the SCT's cover with a Kwik Focus cap equipped with an 82mm solar filter, loaded in a 14mm Pentax eyepiece (~114x with a 34-arcmin FOV) and headed for the sun. I'd gathered info from TheSky, telling me that Venus would now be just over 4-degrees from ol' Sol. So I centered the sun (very minimal sunspot activity, by the way), which completely filled the eyepiece, noted the arbitrary R.A./Dec. figures, moved the 'scope to the general vicinity of Venus, removed the Kwik Focus cap, put a brown blanket over my head ... and immediately came to my senses! What the heck was I doing and thinking?! My paranoia level just hit the stratosphere. A slight screw-up on my part ... and my observing would forever come to an end. 30-seconds later, my adrenalin still pumping, I had the 'scope pointed at the eastern horizon, the Kwik Focus cap back in place and my brown blanket over the entire arrangement. My daughter and I had quite a few things to do on Saturday anyway, so we jumped in the car and off we went.
Returning home late in the day, a neighbor of mine wanted to know what I'd been doing with the 'scope that morning. After explaining the situation, he noted the sun's position in the sky and then suggested I just block the sun with a nearby house. Well, at 11:00am this would have been impossible, but it was certainly doable then. So I gathered up my gear, set up everything on a borrowed dark-green tarp in a third-neighbor's driveway, leveled and aligned the setup again, and with the Kwik Focus solar filter arrangement in place and that 14mm Pentax providing the view, waited and then watched through the eyepiece as a shimmering sun dropped behind a house. Noting the time, I waited another three minutes, verified the setup was completely in shadow, removed the Kwik Focus cap, moved the 'scope slightly to the east ... and a few seconds later I was rewarded with an eyepiece-view of a slightly out-of-focus Venus. Venus was very faint, very jittery and very washed-out. A ghost image. Venus didn't present the shimmering image I've been associating with it, but was truly doing the jitterbug. I imagine this was due to the combined effects of my neighborhood environment and the localized seeing. Just a terrible view -- but one to be remembered. Given the conditions, I could only distinguish the brightest portion of the crescent, which may have extended about 100-degrees. Really tough to tell. I was expecting something like 270-degrees, maybe even more, so I was pretty disappointed. I dropped down in magnification, moving to a 21mm Pentax eyepiece (~76x) which provided a slightly more pleasing view. Still faint and washed-out, but Venus' 100-degree (or so) crescent shape was easier to distinguish.
I probably spent about five or six minutes on Venus, with my neighbor - not very impressed - looking at the planet for another minute or two. Still, something for the observing logs!
Posted on sf-bay-tac Jun 07, 2004 14:41:31 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 04, 2005 19:13:58 PT