I've only ever imaged Venus once, nearly 10 years ago in white light and I thought it was a pretty boring target, so never revisited it. I thought it was boring until I saw false colour images by others over recent years, clearly showing the evolving Venus phases, coupled with subtle, but changing cloud formations. Hence with encouragement from others I invested in a Baader UV filter a few weeks ago, since when I've been waiting for an opportunity to try it. That opportunity was the afternoon of 30 January 2025, so I was out giving it a go. It was a very challenging experience, so here's my tale of woe....
I needed to swap my 642MC for the 290MM, but somehow / somewhere I've lost the nosepiece for the 290 camera, so had to rob the 462, which also had the Baader barlow lens inside, so I needed to remove that. I did that and plugged the camera back into the C14 and after some difficulty got Venus on the chip. Trying to focus in daylight without any shade to screen the laptop was very challenging, so I pulled out my old laptop dew proof tent from the days when I imaged DSO without the benefit of an observatory warm room. That put the laptop in the shade, but I couldn't easily see the screen, at least not with the lower reading portion of my varifocal spectacle lenses, so I still couldn't see when I was in focus as I was mostly viewing through the long disance prescription part of the lenses, which was particularly challenging with the UV filter. The sharper image from the IR filter was a bit easier, but my Astronomic IR642 filter and Baader UV filter are nowhere near parfocal, so I couldn't use focus from IR as a surrogate for the UV. After maybe an hour of frustration, partly fuelled by another UK imager sending me his lovely IR and UV images, I sent him one of mine to him. He immediately replied with, 'why are you using a colour camera?'. WTF...!!! It then dawned on me that after removing the barlow lens from the camera nosepiece I'd only gone and rescrewed it back into the 462MC instead of the 290MM, which was sitting patiently on the side, no doubt wondering why it had been brought out into the sunshine... Doh!! I changed cameras and managed to get a couple of decent IR images, but was still unable to determine accurate focus with the UV filter. I capture and processed what I could, ending up with the attached.
At least it is an image of Venus clouds and hopefully I can get better with better seeing conditions and fewer newbie errors....