Venus Mar 31 - UV

[lepton3]

Quite poor seeing this afternoon, but thought I would have a go at Venus with the new Televue 3x Barlow anyhow. And glad I did, because compared to the 2.5x powermate it gives a nice large image scale, with more transmission at UV (I guess there's just less glass).

This image is constructed a bit differently to my last: here I used UV as luminance, with a normal RGB for colour. I had to do quite a bit of filtering because of the poor seeing at UV, so please excuse the numerous artifacts. Native scale, not resized.

Hope you like seeing a Venus for a change.

-Ivan

[Lester]

Nice view of Venus, Ivan. I cannot tell what the artifacts are. If all those shadings are actual cloud detail then it is a very good image indeed. Thanks for the view.

[lepton3]

Lester,

The artifacts I was talking about are the small light and dark spots sprinkled about the place (although they are not so visible on the uploaded image, which is heavily JPEG compressed).

The cloud banding is real detail, which only comes up in UV.

Thanks for your comments.

-Ivan

[Shiraz]

another really good Venus Ivan. Regards Ray

[Derek Klepp]

Thanks Ivan.Definitely some cloud banding there.

[luigi]

Beautiful image of Venus, I like it!

[lepton3]

Thanks Ray, I've been trying to have a regular look at Venus this elongation. Still playing with different colour schemes.



Yes, Derek, the equatorial banding seems to be a regular feature. Along with the brighter northern pole, it's been on all of my images this season.



Thanks Luigi, glad you liked it!

-Ivan

[asimov]

Some nice detail there Ivan. Just need better seeing. Looks a bit purple/blue in the shadows on my monitor.

[lepton3]

Thanks John, yes, Venus is the opposite to Mars re seeing (i.e not forgiving at all). All the detail is at UV, and also it's low in the sky and the scope/air temp never stabilizes, so there are all sorts of thermals. I use a cafe umbrella to shade the OTA, but there are still thermals.

Plus this time I dropped the cast iron umbrella stand on my foot, so I was capturing in pain! I don't get that with Mars!

Re the colour, I think using UV as L should give a neutral shadow, but you can see from the background the colour balance is skewed to blue. If the data was slightly better, I'd be motivated to try it with UV as B, but I think there's a limit to how much I want to flog a recalcitrant horse!

-Ivan