The view had settled down a bit in the meantime: Mars wasn’t quite round indicating a slightly gibbous phase, and the disk was noticeably uneven in brightness. To improve the contrast, I slipped in an orange No. 23A filter. I grabbed some “best-sharpness” images in zoom mode and kept my fingers crossed. By the time I’d finished filling the memory, it was well into morning twilight, which I had been far too preoccupied to even notice! I turned off the STV, and slewed the LX-200 to Venus, low in the rapidly brightening eastern sky. Bingo, a tiny crescent in the finder. I’d let the scope follow Venus’ climb, capped to avoid the soon-to-rise Sun and loosely covered to protect it from the morning birds. Breakfast time.

By mid-morning under bright blue skies, Venus was well placed and skirting trees in my backyard. Venus was still in the finder, and a easily centered on the STV chip. The turbulence associated with bad seeing made a defocused slender crescent look like a flock of seagulls flying directly at you. A slight twist of the knob sharpened Venus. With the best images downloaded to my laptop, I judged that these were better that those I’d attempted several weeks ago when Venus was very low in the evening sky.

Time to change gears. I removed the dew cap and replaced it with Don’s Baader film solar filter. I taped it firmly in place, along with another filter made for the finder. I touched up the focus on the gigantic sunspot number 9415 near the western limb. The image bubbled and boiled, but that was our atmosphere, not the Sun’s. I had attracted the attention of my neighbors by this time, and they came over to see for themselves. To see the video monitor in the bright sunshine, everyone had to stick their heads in a big cardboard box I’d arranged as a sunshade. It must have been a pretty amusing sight. 

Having assured the neighbors that I wasn’t searching for an eclipse or UFO’s, I moved on to my final target: Jupiter. Solar filters off, dew-cap, er, sun-shade back on. I had seen Jupiter in the daytime one afternoon many years ago, and it was a memorable sight then. I wondered whether that a single-star alignment done almost ten hours ago would point at all accurately. But nonetheless, there was Jupiter, much fainter than Venus, popping in and out of my sight. Jupiter in the daytime is a low-contrast object. But it was recognizable as a squashed ball with two belts, and maybe some detail in them though that may have been my imagination. I was pretty exhausted by this point, wanting a nap almost as much as an image. Jupiter shows more contrast in green than red, so I swapped in a green No. 58 filter. A definite improvement, though in the end, due to the afternoon heating and deteriorated seeing, the challenge of focusing, and low dynamic range, these images are mediocre and decidedly inferior to those I took in the the evening sky. The goal wasn’t a Don-Parker image though, the goal was any image at all!

Not bad: by mid afternoon I’d bagged three planets (four, counting the Earth, seen in the background of the scope shots at right) and a handful of sunspots on the nearest type G2 dwarf star. Gee, I wonder if it will be clear tonight...

Instead of completing his tax return, Doug took these images on 14 April 2001. Moondark is written by Doug Miller, published on the web , and printed in the Delmarva Star Gazers'Star Gazer News and the Delaware Astronomical Society's FOCUS. Please address comments and suggestions to dcmiller@dmv.com. This document was last revised on 18 April 2001. All text and images copyright © 2001 Douglas C. Miller, All Rights Reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without prior permission.