Hi all,

After a too much long dry spell, I could get my first planetary images
of the 2007 during the last Easter period.

Venus was grabbed on the dusk when the Sun was close to the horizon and
I used the Baader U filter with an additional IR blocking filter to
safely prevent any IR leakage.
Fortunately, I could use a fast exposure because of the complete lack of
AR coated glasses to be crossed by the UV radiation.
On the other side, the scope wasn’t collimated at all in both the 2
sessions because no star was visible before of imaging Venus and I also
had to bring it on my car slowly running on destroied mountain roads!
In fact, both the 2 images were grabbed in the northern Appennines at
1300 (Apr. 9th) and 1500 (April 7th) meter altitude were the
transparency was excellent and the seeing sometime was also nice.

Venus here is showing some dark equatorial streak and bright cloud belts
at mid to high latitudes:

The Venus show has just started…