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Conjunction of Venus and Jupiter
February 1, 2008
Jay Albert
I managed to drag myself out of bed well before dawn the morning of February 1st to observe the very close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter...less than half a degree separation. Gary Wasserstein came over to observe with me (he lives a few blocks away in my neighborhood). We used my Celestron NexStar 6 in my driveway. Both planets easily fit in the field of a 38x eyepiece which also showed the equatorial belts and four Galilean moons of Jupiter. Venus was clearly gibbous. It was a rare and beautiful sight.
We also used an 8mm-24mm zoom eyepiece with various filters to observe the planets individually. The seeing was so bad that low in the sky, however, that we were unable to use more than 94x...and the images were boiling. At the latter magnification, a W8 yellow filter helped a lot with Jupiter and we were able to see intensity differences within the equatorial belts, darkening of the polar regions and even suspected part of the north temperate belt. Using a W23A red filter, we could see some duskiness running east-west across the center of Venus. The seeing was too poor to attempt to photograph the conjunction. The seeing got even worse as it got closer to sunrise and I bagged it before 7am.
Regards,
Jay
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