If you take a look at my post of 12/1, both planets look pretty round. But realizing that Venus goes through a cycle of phases, I wondered if the camera picked up that level of detail. I went back to the original hi res image, and enlarged Venus to get the image posted here. Sure enough, the gibbous phase of Venus is clearly visible in the photo! I'd seen pictures before, but had never observed the phases myself.
Notice that in the 12/1 photo Jupiter, many times larger than Venus and more than 40 times the diameter of the Moon, appears as a small, round dot of light almost 6 times farther from Earth than the Sun - and the nearby Moon was just "passing through" on it's monthly revolution around Earth.
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