My western treeline is very high and severely limits my view in that direction. Yesterday I took advantage of the situation and used the trees as a block so I could safely image Venus. I let the Sun get just behind the trees and at that time (4:34 PM) Venus was about an hour and a half past the meridian. This also meant that I could use the dome as an additional block. The planet was close enough to directly overhead that I could image through the open slot without rotating the dome. Slaving the dome to the telescope would have positioned the slot toward the west (and the Sun).
Of course, all that is visible in the image are the sulfuric acid cloud tops in Venus’s very dense atmosphere. Right now the planet is rounding the Sun and heading our way for an inferior conjunction on the 26th of October. Hopefully, I will be able to do the same blocking tricks closer to October and get a good image of Venus as a thin crescent.
The source AVI exposure was 0.607 ms @ 32 fps. The image is a stack of 960 frames (best 10%) selected/stacked by AutoStakkert and processed by RegiStax.