Conjunction of Mercury and Venus at 27 June 2005 |
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When I seriously started imaging the planets in 2005, I noticed in the local sky almanak an event that I now recognize to be quite rare. The planets Mercury and Venus would be passing each within a few arcminutes. Fortunately, at the time, I decided to try and capture this event. With the C9.25 at f/10, the two planets would be fitting comfortabely on the CCD of the ATK 1HS, the camerea I used back then. The above picture was captured during daytime, at 19:00 to 20:30 MEZT. This was the first time I used my mount's setting circles to locate Venus. Once I succesfully found Venus, Mercury was easy to locate. As shown above, both planets fitted in my FOV. I used two exposures and combined the two images to compensate for the higher surface brightness of Venus. I can recall seeing Mercury in my finder, which I never have been able to repeat. Usually the planet is far to dim and has to be located prime focus. But because I knew it's position next to the brighter Venus, I caught glimpses of Mercury as wel. Not bad for a first try at this elusive planet! |
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After imaging at f/25, I took these two images of Venus and Mercury at f/25. Mercury clearly shows his phase, which was about 60 % at the time. It's difficult to assign surface features to the disc, although I get the impression som albedo features may be visible. Venus is a featureless disc. I tried (also for the first time) to capture UV details on the disc, but found the planet to be unremarkable fuzzy in UV. Only later I would discover why..... It would be some time before I imaged both planets again, and in retrospect I appreciate how lucky I was to capture this rare event.
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