The Big Gun

So you all saw my photograph of Venus yesterday, taken with a relatively small, inexpensive refracting telescope.  And as you saw, the crescent of Venus photo was kind of blurry.  Plus, I held my camera and lens over the eyepiece and tried to get a photograph that way.  It was not a high quality photo.  So, today I decided to photograph Venus the right way, and I got out my "big gun" telescope and put it on this fancy Equatorial tracking mount.  And my results were much better.  I used my Sony a7 camera which was attached directly to the back of this telescope.  And here are my results:

This is more like it!  This is what Venus actually looked like through the eyepiece of this telescope - a very thin, very delicate crescent.  This is what I saw yesterday.  But here was the surprise.  I had no idea how large this crescent would be in my camera.  I was stunned to see how incredible tiny it was.  This next photograph is the whole "negative" and Venus on the negative is a tiny speck.  Please click on it to see how tiny.