Dave Wallace's Adventures in Astronomy

12/13/2003 2105 UTC

It was darned cold (30 degrees F!) but I just had to get a look at Venus. It was just about local sunset and there was a light breeze. I knew I wouldn't be able to stand the weather for more than a few minutes anyway, so I decided to set up the telescope in my driveway rather than driving to some other locale. Of course, I couldn't do an alignment because Venus was the only object in the sky bright enough to see. So I concentrated on simply getting the telescope level and aimed it north by magnetic compass (allowing for deviation). Set-up took about five minutes, including getting the telescope pointed at the planet.

I could tell I was looking through a pretty disturbed atmosphere and there was a prismatic effect as well -- the planet looked redish on one limb and bluish on the other (which is not normally a problem I see with my optics). But I could tell that I was looking at a spherical object that was not fully illuminated (gibbous phase -- about 87% illuminated). Very bright, too (about magnitude -4), which made it easy to see even though the sky was quite bright still. The best view was at 96X (2X Barlow and 26mm eyepiece); I tried for 167X (Barlow and 15mm eyepiece) but the results were less clear.

By 4:30 PM local time, I'd had it -- I can't operate the scope with gloves on and my fingers were about to fall off. So I dragged the stuff back into the house. A glance at the thermomiter showed that the temperature had dropped by five degrees in just the half-hour I was outside. Ah the joys of trying to do astronomy in New England in the winter!