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Another nice view of Venus in daylight. This was yesterday. Maximum brilliance or brightest magnitude for this cycle was yesterday though the plateau is very flat so the planet will be nearly the same brightness for several more weeks. It's really quite easy to see "naked eye" in daylight. Low-power binoculars (or a sextant scope) help to get you started. Once you find it with binoculars, "walk" Venus to a convenient foreground object, "perched" on a tree limb for example. Then when you try without binoculars, it jumps right out.

Photos, like this one, are more difficult than naked eye observing since your phone camera usually operates in an auto-focus mode and has trouble with an empty blue sky. I don't know if the clouds helped the focus here, but they did at least help with visual tracking.

The first photo below is, as is. That's how it looked straight off the phone camera. The second with the zoom box is just for folks who have trouble seeing it in the original. It's a finder chart.

Frank Reed

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