A matter of Perspective

Second place winner in the 2023 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Still images of phases of Venus: A matter of Perspective, by Christofer Baez

This exquisite series of images, captured from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, between 17 December 2019 and 25 May 2020, shows the phases of Venus as seen from Earth. As Venus and Earth orbit the Sun, we observe different portions of Venus’s sunlit half, similar to the Moon’s phases. The sequence clearly shows Venus as distant, small, bright and gibbous in the lower frames, and ends with Venus reaching the biggest apparent size of all planets (upper frames), very close to the Sun with a small elongation, and appearing as a thin crescent. In the last frame, only 2.8% of the planet’s surface is illuminated.

Credit: Christofer Baez/IAU OAE (CC BY 4.0)