September 23rd, 2019, 06:00 a.m. local time
Early mornings on early Fall days. These are great because they offer pre-dawn viewing of Orion high in the Southern Sky, here in the Northern Hemisphere. This morning, the Moon was close by, so I quickly took the above picture with NightCap on my iPhone.
Besides the Moon and Orion, you also can see Aldebaran in the top right. To the bottom left is another star, which I think may be Procyon of Canis Minor. Sirius hung just below Orion and out of the picture, as it was behind trees.
I performed minor touchups to this image to “push out” the key stars, to make them more visible, so that you can see their position relative to the Moon. I did this by increasing the Soft Focus in PaintShop Pro to just the selected star areas, several times over. Generally, I don’t like to touch up images like this, but I felt it at least added a little perspective with the Moon nearby.
