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We're already well into the season of daylight Venus. We have had many, many cloudy days with deluges of rain in southern New England this summer, but today was nice with mostly clear blue skies. I grabbed the photo below with a "common" iPhone with its normal magnification capability. No other optics involved. I could see Venus clearly "naked eye", too, without optical aid, but it was much easier --really very easy-- in binoculars. Keeping it in field in binoculars, I "walked it" to a little branch on a high tree. The distance to the little branch was about 20 meters. That gave the phone camera something distant to focus on. The Declination was just a few minutes of arc south of the celestial equator this afternoon. It's heading much further south in the next few months and will do its inferior conjunction "loop" near Spica.

This is a great time to try for a "Venus + Sun" fix. Shoot either the Sun or Venus at meridian passage for latitude. Then immediately grab a sight of the other body for longitude. No plotting needed. Just a quick calculation, and you have an excellent fix. You have a couple of months to try this. Then two to three weeks off, around conjunction. And then a couple of months to try again, lasting into early 2027.

Frank Reed

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