Yesterday I've been informed by a guy who asked our observatory about
suitability of a 10cm telescope for observing the Venus eclipse, that it
happens today (otherwise I would miss it probably).

I found out yesterday, when the weather was good, that even with my poor
eyes I can find Venus with 10x binoculars on a fork and see its crescent
easily. Of course, with a parallactic mount and scales it's simpler.

We have bad weather now (just glimpsing Venus through fainter clouds
occasionally), it will be even more cloudy later, but there is 
almost clear skies in most Italy, as I watch the Meteosat images. Try
to find Venus, 25 degrees from the Sun, it should disappear during one
minute around 13:14 summertime or so in Padua (around 12:52 in Barcelona,
13:23 in Brno).

Yesterday I expressed a regret that this phenomenon cannot be used
for education on night environment, unlike the comet in Cancer/Lynx, but
my friend Ludek Vasta opposed: we can stress it is one of the very rare
astronomical phenomena, where light pollution is no problem.

The three maps show the configuration of planets and the detail
of Moon with Venus. On the detailed images, Moon is in the
correct angular scale (the cross at Venus is 2.5 degrees large), once
geocentric, once topocentric, showing the proper crescent. On the overview
image, Moon and Sun have some default minimum sizes, the other wandering
and fixed stars circles have areas proportional to brightness.

I guess the luminance of the brightest part of the Moon 
to be less than 200 cd/m2, so it won't be visible in lowlands, 
when the Venus will be emerging again from behind it 
(at about 14:38 in Padua, at about 14:47 in Brno).

Jenik,  May 21, 2004, 12:00 CEST = 10:00 UTC.