Note: This post is 6 years old. Some information may no longer be correct or even relevant. Please, keep this in mind while reading.
The apparent diameter of Jupiter varies with the Earth-Jupiter distance. Depending on the distance, the apparent angular diameter of Jupiter is between approx. 0.5 and 0.8 arcminutes. For best astrophotography results, one should pick a time when Jupiter is closest. Similar to my plot of the apparent size of Venus, I wrote a short program to plot Jupiter’s apparent diameter for the time period 2017-2026 (see featured image).
Note: This post is 6 years old. Some information may no longer be correct or even relevant. Please, keep this in mind while reading.
The apparent diameter of the Moon varies with the Earth-Moon distance. Depending on the distance, the apparent angular diameter of the Moon is between 29.4 and 33.5 arcminutes. For best astrophotography results, one should pick a time when the moon is closest. Similar to my plot of the apparent size of Venus, I wrote a short program to plot the Moon’s apparent diameter (see featured image).
Note: This post is 6 years old. Some information may no longer be correct or even relevant. Please, keep this in mind while reading.
The apparent size of Venus varies dramatically with the Earth-Venus distance, depending on both orbits around the sun. The apparent angular diameter of Venus is between 0.175 and 1 arcminutes.
“the extreme crescent phase of Venus can be seen without a telescope by those with exceptionally acute eyesight, at the limit of human perception.”
I will definitely try next time with my naked eyes, but if you have an entry-level telescope, you will be certainly be better able to see the crescent phase during closest approach.
The question is, when does Venus come closest to Earth for best observation? Not finding anything on the interwebs, I wrote a quick plotting program with Python’s ephem package and gnuplot.
Venus apparent diameter plot for 2017-2020
Graph of apparent diameter of Venus in arcminutes for the time period 2017-2020
Here is the very short Python program that calculates the apparent diameter of Venus for 4 years beginning with January 2017:
#!/usr/bin/python3
import datetime as dt
import ephem
import math
from math import radians as rad, degrees as deg
venus = ephem.Venus()
venus_diameter_meters = 2 * 6051800
au_meters = 149597870700
t = dt.datetime.strptime("20170101", "%Y%m%d")
diff = dt.timedelta(days = 1)
for i in range(0, int(4 * 365)):
venus.compute(t)
dist_venus_meters = venus.earth_distance * au_meters
angular_diameter_arcminutes = 60 * deg(2 * math.asin(venus_diameter_meters / (2 * dist_venus_meters)))
print(t.strftime("%Y-%m-%d"), angular_diameter_arcminutes)
t += diff
