Venus Aug 4 and a try at Mercury

[Shiraz]

Venus is now much easier to image at higher elevations. The attached montage shows how much it's appearance has changed over the past few months.

Mercury is also near 50% phase, but is much harder to image due to the low elevation (and the nearly constant clouds..). The attached composite image of Mercury, with Venus for comparison, just possibly shows some faint surface texture - it persisted over three imaging runs and different processing methods, so it is probably not noise. Pleasantly surprising to get any hint of detail in view of the really bad low elevation seeing last night. Hopefully the sky will clear a bit before the planet drops out of sight again.

thanks for looking.

[Liz]

They look good Ray!! great to see the comparison over time. :thumbsup:

[Screwdriverone]

Gotta love a montage!

That's a really good result and the details are great, well done Ray.

Thanks for posting these.

Cheers

Chris

[Shiraz]

Hi Liz and Chris. Thanks very much for your encouraging comments. Chris, hope the new scope combo works well.

[StephenM]

Looks great Ray. There should be some good crescent image opportunities over the next couple of months.

Cheers,
Stephen

[Shiraz]

Thanks Stephen.
Yes, the next couple of months will be very interesting as the apparent size of the planet eventually exceeds that of Jupiter and it takes on a crescent shape - and it drops into the neighbours trees....
regards Ray

[shelltree]

These are great Ray, thanks for sharing!

[Shiraz]

Hi Shell
thanks for your kind comment.

[rick01]

Yes, montage looks very nice :).

Roman

[Shiraz]

Thanks Roman - have you been able to do any Venus imaging recently?
regards Ray