Mars is about as close as it ever gets to the earth now, and therefore is about as bright as ti gets. I appears in the sky close to the moon.
So about 1:30 after the moon had got high in the sky, I went out with the telephoto lens to see whether I could take a picture of the two together. I found that while they look close in the sky, I really couldn’t get them in the same picture. If I zoomed in enough to make Mars visible in the picture, I couldn’t get the moon in the frame. And if I zoomed out enough to get both in the frame, Mars was too small a dot to show up.
So I decided I would zoom in to 400mm and see what Mars looked like. While it is a long lens, it is certainly no telescope. But Mars looked like more than just a point of light.
This is the way it showed up in the picture. I did not enhance the color or enlarge anything. This is a 100% crop out of the center of the frame:
So about 1:30 after the moon had got high in the sky, I went out with the telephoto lens to see whether I could take a picture of the two together. I found that while they look close in the sky, I really couldn’t get them in the same picture. If I zoomed in enough to make Mars visible in the picture, I couldn’t get the moon in the frame. And if I zoomed out enough to get both in the frame, Mars was too small a dot to show up.
So I decided I would zoom in to 400mm and see what Mars looked like. While it is a long lens, it is certainly no telescope. But Mars looked like more than just a point of light.
This is the way it showed up in the picture. I did not enhance the color or enlarge anything. This is a 100% crop out of the center of the frame: