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| Venus |
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When Galileo heard of and then saw the phases of Venus, it was the final confirmation for him that the planets, including earth, go around the sun, not that everything goes around us. This was not convincing evidence for many others including the church because it was still possible to come up with a possible mechanism to account for these phases. It wasn't until the movements of a pendulum at different latitudes were observed and investigated that it became indisputably clear that the earth rotated around an axis, not that the sun circled around the earth. It then followed that the movements of the planets and the phases of Venus could only be accounted for by the ancient Greek Euclid's view of a sun centered solar system The “rainbowing” that you see around the edges of Venus (the blue edge at the top and orange edge along the bottom) is from the slight prism effect of it’s light being refracted by our atmosphere because of it's low angle above the horizon |
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8" F10 Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope, 15mm
eyepiece, 2x barlow, Canon G2 at 1.8x |