Perigee Moon

Perigee Moon, originally uploaded by mistersnappy.

Tonight the Moon is the biggest and brightest it will be for all of 2010 and it’s accompanied to it’s left by a nice shiny red Mars. I, of course, am still struggling with taking any decent photos of the night sky. Apparently my little Canon 300D is good for taking astronomical photographs, albeit grainy and small ones, but I can’t get the hang of it, especially as I’m taking them in the dark.
This photo, however, is tonight’s favourite because for all the blur you get the red of Mars and some nice lens reflections of the Moon split into greens, blues and a nice shade of pink.
Since the last photo I’ve switched to using RAW rather than default jpg and popped the ISO to 200 as this is apparently the optimum setting. RAW seems to get rid of the nasty red dots too.
Maybe when the Moon is a little less bright I might be able to capture some detail, but then again maybe not!