[Shiraz (Ray)]

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.