Mid-day Venus sighting!

by Bob Czerwinski

This afternoon I visited the TAC website for the first time in a couple of months (my bad!) and read through a gazillion TAC messages. Mark Wagner's June 30th message about his mid-day spotting of Venus caught my attention, so about 2:00pm I brought up TheSky on my laptop, identified Venus' position, wandered outside to a shady position ... and had Venus in my eyesight in seemingly no time at all. Yep, when you know just where to look, Venus is easily spotted. Which leads me to...

Constantly traveling internationally on business, my nighttime observing sessions have been few and far between as of late (mostly from a private location in Wales), but I did manage a daytime n*ked-eye viewing of the Moon's occultation of Venus the afternoon of June 18th from Landshut, Germany, about 40-miles northeast of Munich. While folk in the northern portion of the country were battling it out with clouds that day, we had relatively clear skies in southeast Germany. I'd pulled up an event timetable from the IOTA website (http://www.lunar-occultations.com/iota/iotandx.htm), looked up the Munich occultation times, as well as the Moon's Alt-Az info, so I knew just where in the sky the Moon and Venus would be and when Venus would disappear. Locating the Moon and Venus in the sky wasn't difficult at all; I carry a GPS receiver with me and just used its electronic compass function to identify the bearing. Sure enough, almost due south, about 60-degrees above the horizon, I quickly spotted a pale crescent Moon and a relatively bright Venus. The disappearance of Venus was relatively quick, with the non-sunlit portion of the Moon quickly blocking Venus from sight; pretty cool! I missed the reappearance, but wandered outside about twenty minutes after the occultation had ended, easily spotting Venus again, already about a crescent-width's distance from the Moon. N*ked-eye daylight viewing at its best!

I'm back in the Bay Area at the moment, waiting to hear if I'm heading to Lassen or to Mexico this week. Sure hope it's to GSSP!

...Bob...