Sunday, April 5, 2015

Gibbous Venus 4-5-2015

I manged to take a fairly decent image of Venus tonight. The seeing was poor and the planet was shimmering and dancing the field of view. The images were taken with my ASI120MM and ETX 125 on an iOptron SmartEQ Pro. The images were stacked in Registax and processed in Photoshop.

Venus is gibbous at the moment, but it's just a phase (sorry-couldn't resist). The phases of Venus were first seen by Galileo in 1610. As soon as he saw them, Galileo knew that Copernicus was right. Venus' phases could only be explained it it revolved around the sun. His observation refuted the idea that the Earth had a central position in the Universe and as the stationary point around which all motion revolved.

The gibbous phase of Venus is clearly visible in this image


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