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.

Looking for Venus, in an improvised location, with an improvised rig, battling all odds

The ESP32 vs, well, the universe

these ESP32 boards are a bliss

Venus and the Moon and the railroad on 2021-08-10