Venus

You can see a very bright star in the evening skies these days. Have a look at the western skies, just after the sunset, you will see a very bright star. It is so bright, that you can see it just after the sun sets and the skies are still blue.

This is not actually a star. It's the planet Venus. It is easy to identify as it is pretty much the most brightest object in the night sky (barring the moon) and appears only right before the sun rise or right after the sun set and stays on for about two hours. This made the ancients call it the Morning Star and the Evening Star. The Babylons understood that these two stars are in fact the same.

Here's my very first attempt on capturing Venus:

Venus - 50x1/800sec at ISO100

If you are wondering as to why it seems to be a partial disk, more like the Moon, it is for the exact reason. Just like the Moon, Venus has phases, but instead of just 28 days, the cycle lasts 584 days. And right now it is in a "halfway" through a phase.

The photo above was taken through a Canon 550D coupled with a 2x magnifier (not exactly a Barlow, but technically a Barlow) through  a NexStar 4SE. 50 shots of 1/800 sec exposures at ISO 100 were stacked on Registax and then post processed to come up with the above photo.

Note: I realised that Blogger (or Google+ Photos) does a heavy post processing and a compression when uploaded. This image looked like a black patch when it was uploaded. Now on I am going to upload it to FB and then link it from here.