Hello, I'm still here while it's a bit late.

I just finished a long run of editing...

Yeah, in @apsu's moon shot comments there was some discussion about compositing images together to make it look like the stars were visible behind the moon, so I decided to create something like that.

Moon and the stars

Camera body: Canon EOS 550D
Lens: EF 75-300mm ƒ/4-5.6
Focal length: 300mm
Aperture: ƒ/8
Exposure: 1/160 s
ISO: Dual-ISO 100+400

While the stars are quite real, they were so dim I had to lighten them up many times before they were visible, and still they looked pretty awful and small. I also had to get rid of much of the noise so there is a possibility many real stars disappeared and some noise ended up being stars.

I also had to composite two star images together to get more of those visible stars instead of distant dim galaxies and stuff, so this sky is completely not real. The stars are taken from two positions in the sky. I couldn't shoot the ones on the moon's path, because there was too much light pollution to the South of where I was. I had to shoot North and East to get visible stars.

While shooting East, I noticed something peculiar:

Look at the bright one and the smaller one below it.

Camera body: Canon EOS 550D
Lens: EF 75-300mm ƒ/4-5.6
Focal length: 110mm
Aperture: ƒ/8
Exposure: 2.5 s
ISO: Dual-ISO 400+800

Could it be those are Mars and Venus?

I zoomed, and got one of them but I could not focus, as it was just too far away, and the focusing on the 75-300mm lens is awful. But it does look like a planet.

Mars?

Camera body: Canon EOS 550D
Lens: EF 75-300mm ƒ/4-5.6
Focal length: 300mm
Aperture: ƒ/8
Exposure: 2.5 s
ISO: Dual-ISO 400+800

I'm not sure, but to the plain eye, and even before editing, the dot looked red to my eyes. I had to desaturate the stars somewhat because there were a lot of different coloured dots that looked like stars, noise or something that needed to be turned into whitish to fool the eye to think the stars in the moon shot were real(ish). I couldn't be bothered to make an unedited copy of the shot.

I'm starting to slow down as I'm getting more and more tired as it's closing 3am.

Anyway, here's the today's close-up of the moon:

Perfect!

It came out beautifully! Simply beautiful... Although I still think the lens could be a bit better. Am I wrong, or does it seem like it's not a full moon anymore but waning already?

See ya!

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