The telescopes over Venus

We have many telescopes on Earth and in outer space. Probably our best 'scopes are in the deserts Down Under. The clouds don't condense in the Atacama or the Outback - much less in the Antarctic winter. There also aren't so many people around to shine night-lights. The Northern Hemisphere tends to irrigate deserts but we do own some isolated mountaintops, like Mauna Kea.

Outer space does have one disadvantage relative to Earth night: the Sun. If there's ever a Mars colony, one way it can add value is to use Martian night - perhaps on Olympus. At certain spans in the Mars-Earth synodic year, Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the Sun, so Mars can see what Earth and her satellites can't.

Earth and Venus share their own synodic - and that's what this blog is for.

Most will laugh at the thought of Venus-stationed telescopes: landside and cloudlevel both, like Dante's Inferno, won't ever see the stars. (UPDATE 2/2/2020: but now consider L2's line-of-sight.) And Koski & Grcevich (pp. 89-90) had left upper-deck mechanics to others. So: cue, those others. You're at the home of the Forever Flotilla. They never see a cloud overhead. 'Tis true that it is always 11 AM up here... until it's not. (Leaving aside the infrared.)

Venus-based astronomers won't start out flying a nuclear station forever on the night side, as the sky-port does in daylight. We generally book time in advance when we need to train a telescope somewhere; I expect similar over Venus.

Tom Benedict's essay "Realistic Astronomy" in Koboldt's book should be kept in mind, that the actual astronomers will be resting in (relative) comfort in a faculty-lounge somewhere. The ship will be piloted by telescope-operators, who may or may not know anything about what they're observing. Even the operators will be using remote control on account that telescopes like darkness, and humans in flight insist on at least a lighted console. Although the ops're going to want a line-of-sight with the drone.

When the telescope-operator has a time and a direction, that 'scope-bearing drone and the operators' plane get unmoored from the flotilla, and drift back into night. At night the drone vessel rolls back its shade and its telescope spends three Earth days observing what it must observe. The operators, in their more-standard plane, keep a line-of-sight to the drone.