Venus, 2021-08-15 through a solar continuum (green) filter

Alright, let’s go after Venus with whatever I have at hand. The local time is 16:45 (13:45Z), Venus is at around the meridian at around 45 degrees high. Behind a brightly lit blue void. The available rig: ASI 120MM (cooled), Baader Solar Continuum Filter 1.25″, barlow lenses, TS-Optics 76/342 TS76EDPH, mountpusher, EQ3-mod. Fun part: the bright sunlight and the bright blue sky made it next to impossible to spot Venus, using a mount that’s not properly aligned, thus almost no coordinates. However, I cheated. I used the Sun — fairly easy to find — to get an idea about the RA of the unaligned mount, drew lines onto the mount (it has seen worse), and I hacked together a few lines of arduino with a dev board and an MPU 9250 to show me the attitude of the scope. Have I mentioned how handy these little ESP32 dev boards are, and how arduino in general solves decade old problems, making the pedestal of obscurity embedded is in general shake a wee bit? However, I feel literally, physically tired of having to outsmart and circumvent, or just brute force every possible issue the universe (or better call it real estate maffia, then govid-19, among other issues) has in store for my hobby. Given the instruments, this picture is nowhere near the quality of my epic Venus season.

(tovább…)