The best photos by far are those taken using webcams! The big problem with conventional digital photography is what astronomers call the 'seeing' -- the turbulence of our atmosphere which causes the image to shimmer. You get the same effect when using a long lens terrestrially -- ever tried a long-distance shot and been disappointed by the shockingly low contrast and blurred results, and blamed the lens? Webcams and other video sources, however, can take hundreds or thousands of shots, and freeware called Registax will select the best frames and stack them to produce a result sharper than any individual frame. The limited resolution of the webcam is a small price to pay for sharp shots. But Alamy wouldn't like it!
I used a 10D and a 1000 mm Russian mirror lens, but the best shots were those taken using apochromatic refractors with long focal lengths and webcams. You can see a selection at
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.scagell/Venus/
Oh, and the reason why the orientation was different from in the papers is that the Sun was moving through the sky at an ever-changing angle as we are at mid latitudes. But your viewing setup showed Venus relative to the horizon. Astronomers use equatorial mounts (with one axis parallel to the Earth's) to overcome this problem and keep north at the top where it belongs.
Robin Scagell Galaxy Picture Library
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