February 2nd, 2017, 6:45 p.m. local time
Concluding my week-long observation of the waxing Moon and Venus, tonight the sky was clear enough to attempt to bring Mars into the picture. Mars is really far away from us now, so it is really dim. I look forward to May when the fourth planet reaches opposition again and should be extremely bright.
So I set my smartphone’s exposure to 0.3 seconds, held it very steady, and got the image above. You can barely see Mars as a tiny dot to the upper left of Venus.
The problem of capturing faint Mars along with the intense Moon is the same problem in capturing both Jupiter and its four Galilean moons in the same exposure. Any good pictures you see of Jupiter and its moons is a composite of two, one for the planet and another for the moons.
With the weekend approaching, I am hoping for clear skies to again attempt pictures of Venus and the Moon through one or both of my telescopes.
