For the first time in what feels like forever the skies over east central Scotland on Monday finally cleared and brought the opportunity to once more dust off my old 60mm Tasco refractor for a short study of Venus. Using a magnification of 160X I managed a closer observation albeit with a lot more chromatic aberration, but then Venus is not a planet that often yields much in the way of surface detail when using a small instrument so I felt I could live with it.

Shining at a magnitude of -4.25 Venus was a blazing beacon in the evening sky and through the telescope I could clearly see that the planet was fast approaching it’s quarter phase. If you’re interested in catching Venus during it’s quarter phase then the best time to do so will be between the 6th and 13th of January by which point the planet will also have brightened between -4.31 and -4.34 in magnitude.

As well as taking in a view of Venus I also decided to track down a planet that I have never observed before: Neptune. For this task I used my Strathspey 25×100 binoculars and it wasn’t long before I had the tenuous planet within my field of view. Caught in the glare of Venus and at a magnitude of 7.96 Neptune proved to be a slight challenge. Here I had to use averted vision to precisely locate this distant ice giant and while the 25×100s did not resolve a planetary disc or anything remotely in the way of detail I can at least say that I have finally seen Neptune.

Tags: Neptune, Strathspey 25x100, Tasco 60mm, Venus, Weather

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Astro Art, Observing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.