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Community photo entitled  by Nathan Eaton Jr on 06/24/2022 at Dallas, Texas, USA

On 06/24/2022 05:36 am by Nathan Eaton Jr| Dallas, Texas, USA

I had originally planned to go find a spot out in the countryside with dark skies to take this shot but just the Moon and planets on their own with nothing interesting in the foreground seemed a bit boring. I did a number of test shots over the past week and determined that even with the bright lights of downtown Dallas, they would still be visible in a shot like this.

Unfortunately, the haze was just a bit too heavy this morning for Mercury to really show up. It's there but just hard to see without zooming in really close. Given how close the planet orbits the Sun, it is never that far above the horizon while the sky is still dark enough to see it. I have some other shots I still need to go through though so if I have another where it's more visible, I will post it.

This image was created by taking four shots with a 15mm wide angle lens. Two were taken with the camera level (to avoid vertical distortion of buildings, bridges, etc.), one aimed just left of the Margaret Hunt Hill bridge (the brightly lit suspension bridge) and the other aimed towards the bright street light to the right. The other images were taken in the same directions but aimed high enough to capture Jupiter and Saturn. The four images were merged as a panorama in Adobe Lightroom.

Nikon D750, Irix Firefly 15mm f/2.4 lens

Four images (two with camera level, two aimed higher), merged together as panorama in Lightroom, edits for exposure and sharpness, noise reduction applied with ON1 NoNoise AI. Labels added with Vectr.