Just six days before inferior conjunction, Venus was a slender crescent about 11 degrees southeast of the sun when I took this photo using a Questar Duplex 3.5 inch telescope and a DMK Imaging Source camera. The planet, not visible to the naked eye, was lost in the sun's mid-day glare. I found the planet using the Questar setting circles and a rough daytime polar alignment by knowing the the position of the sun at that time of day. After locking in the right ascension and declination coordinates of the sun, I shifted the entire scope and tripod until the sun was centered and the tripod level. Then I dialed in the coordinates of Venus, removed the solar filter and it appeared in a low power eyepiece. The original image is in black and white. I added false color to render the sky a more realistic color.

This is a stack of about 200 frames from 400, processed with Keith's Image Stacker, a program written for Mac computers.