The night sky on July 31, 2018

I started playing with taking some pictures of the moon and mars on the night of 7-27-18, because that night was the start of Mar's closest approach to us, but it wasn't until tonight, the 31st, that I was accompanied by Amiri. He had his I-pad out on the deck with the starchart app on it, and identified some additional planets for me. 

This post will show you the best of my pictures. I must have taken more than a hundred. I used to think that it was tricky getting a decent shot of the moon. It's much trickier getting a picture of a planet. They're not as bright as the moon of course and at the high magnification I have to use to give them any apparent size at all, they disappear off the edges of my screen very easily. After they're gone, I have to zoom back down to about 30 power, find them again and start to coax their image upwards once more. But I had fun doing it.

I hope you enjoy what I offer... 

Taken at about 9 p.m. on our 7-31-18.

(The pictures of the planets look much bigger here than they really are. Don't compare their apparent size with the photo of the moon. Not to scale in other words) 

To produce this, I took my best shot of Mars and cropped it. What that does is to make it look bigger. It's no clearer, but I am happy to see there is some evidence of color variation across the photo, which suggests features on Mars. 

This is Saturn

A little closer. Saturn was hard to get good ones because it's dimmer than the others. 

This is the same picture as the one just above it, but I cropped it, increased the light, and increased the clarity. I was hoping that a few pixels would be off to the sides, indicating the presence of the rings, but they just don't show. 

And here is Venus

Not quite as bright as the last one. Venus was getting low on the western horizon by this time so I was shooting through a lot of atmosphere. It looked brighter to my eye than these shots would indicate. 

A little larger.

Again, this is cropped to make it appear much bigger.

 We're coming up on Jupiter 

I seem to have a little 'notch' showing in the top of these last two photos. Don't know why. 

This was my best shot.

Cropped and adjusted as the others were. 

That's all for the planets. Let's close by looking at a couple more of the moon...

I took this on 7-27-18 when the moon was full and had just cleared our neighbor's rooftop.  I like how the moon seems to be faceted. It's all due to the clouds.

This one is the same shot, but cropped and with some 'artsy' effects added to it.    -djf