August 9th, 2020, 4:35 a.m. local time
For the past couple of days, I have gotten up very early, either at or before Dawn. The first case was for a terrestrial matter. But for the second, today, it was for the view of the Moon and Mars.
This was the closest I’ve seen a planet to the Moon in the few years of this blog. They seemed much closer than the image infers, when you factor in their placement in the huge, expansive dome of the sky.
I had toyed with the idea of pulling out the big telescope for a closeup of Mars, but I’m glad I deferred, as this Waning Gibbous phase was still very bright.
I am going to try for more early morning observations. The world is far more…peaceful at 4am. Light pollution is noticeably less. I have noticed an uptick in both noise and light pollution within these past few months after Dusk, likely due to commercial venues being largely unavailable, so people are congregating more in the residential areas instead of going out, and more and more it seems lately as the lockdowns continue in their dysfunctional and disjoint forms. At least in America, we’ve lost a lesson from our Prohibition era, that you can’t eliminate activity, only drive it out of sanctioned sight, either elsewhere or underground.
And what may be pertinent soon, meteor showers are normally at their best before dawn, since that is the time of day your section of the world is turning into the Earth’s orbital path.
This picture was difficult to frame. Normally, I use a default of 4×6 inches. But given the placement of the two objects in relation to each other, that frame didn’t feel right. Finally I decided that a simple square looked best.
The image is a composite, based off of the Moon, with tiny Mars overlayed from a higher exposure and ISO.
Image settings (Moon):
- Canon EOS SL3
- f/5.6
- 1/250 sec exposure
- ISO 100
- Exposure bias: 0
- Focal length: 300mm
- Minor editing and composite with Mars done in PaintShop Pro
