This one caught me by surprise on the evening of 27 June 2005. By chance I happened to look at the western horizon and noticed that Venus had a dimmer companion very close by. A quick look at SkyMapPro showed that Mercury was only about 5 arc-seconds from Venus and wouldn't appear any closer than that until December 1st 2070, (and that during the day from the UK too).Figuring that I was very unlikely to get this weird photo-oppportunity again, I grabbed the VC200L, the Toucam and my lap-top and set up to grab a few frames. The image above is a Registax of 30 seconds-worth of 15 frames/second images taken at around 21.00 BST. The blue sky is not an artifact. The phases of Venus (91%) and Mercury (61%) show up reasonably clearly.
In hindsight, I wish I'd used the wider field refractor to give an impression of just how close the pair looked. Oh well, I'll guess I'll try and aim to stick around for 2070..
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