I took these photos of the Moon and Venus tonight at around 7:00 PM EST.
Today I spotted Venus in broad daylight using my unaided eye. Specifically, it was 12:40 PM EST on Saturday, 31 January 2009. According to my Solar System Calculator, Venus is currently at at magnitude −4.59. My Astronomy Calendar says that it will be at its most brilliant this year, −4.71, on 20 February 2009.
Here is a photograph of Venus I took by pointing my digital camera into my telescope at around 1:00 PM EST:
Unfortunately, the atmosphere was very unsteady, so it is hard to see the actual crescent shape as it appeared to my eye. The shape was definitely narrower and sharper than this.
This photograph shows the approximate position in the sky where I spotted Venus. Because of the limitations of the digital camera, you can barely see the Moon here, and Venus is completely invisible. I put a yellow box around the moon, and a red box around the approximate position where I spotted Venus. The camera is facing the southeast.
This is the telescope I used for the photograph of Venus above. I took this photograph a few minutes after the Venus photograph. You can see it is quite a bright, sunny day!
I took this photograph to document the shocking fact that my cat JoJo doesn't care a whit about Venus!
