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Details:
Mars was grazed by the Moon for the St. George area between 10:08-10:18pm MST. I didn't have to travel anywhere, just set up in the back yard. Seeing was average. The Moon blocked at most 1/3 of Mars' disk. I could watch Mars creep slowly past various craters (the ones labelled in yellow) in realtime near or at the edge of the Moon. Seeing it "land" and "take off" again (i.e. black sky reappearing between the two) was pretty neat. Not being equipped for planetary AP, I settled for visual observing, only taking a souvenir photo shortly afterwards through the telescope's eyepiece with a smartphone. 4 hours later I took a wide-field photo to show how far apart the two had become by then.
Photos:
#1: The original smartphone photo. You can see I didn't get lined up well to shoot through the eyepiece. The scope's optics reversed the image.
#2: The smartphone photo unreversed, zoomed in closer, and labelled. The white labels denote major features. Gray labels name subsidiary landmarks. The "m" item, Meton, is a strange looking crater that always reminds me of a 3- or 4-leaf clover--it clearly consists of at least 3 crater hits; it's too bad the photo barely shows it. The yellow labels mark craters with crisply defined shadowed rims that made it easy to compare Mars' movement to.
#3: The Moon and Mars 4 hours later form a striking view over the city with Taurus the Bull.
Photo data:
#1: iPhone 7 afocally through a Questar 3.5" telescope; 10:20pm MST (2 min after end of event)
#2: ditto (labeled)
#3: Panasonic GX8, 12-35mm lens @ 35mm; f/2.8, 1.6 sec, ISO 400; tripod; 2am MST (4 hrs later)
Photographer's website:
No URL provided.
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