Moon Meets Venus

First of all, thank you to my husband for telling me this beauty was visible this morning. Had he not, I would have totally missed this opportunity. I was very curious to see if my Seestar smart telescope would be able to capture panels for a panoramic image in the same manner my mirrorless camera would. I've never attempted a panoramic set with the Seestar before. It was a bit challenging at first, but I was able to work between different modes on the telescope to finally capture enough images with the exposures I liked. My biggest challenge was that I was not tracking, and had to manually move the scope for each panel, with enough overlap so that I could accurately stitch them later. Fumbling around with this was somewhat stressful as the sun was quickly rising to blow out any visible stars other than the Moon and Venus, and I really wanted a few more stars to make the image as close to what I saw with the naked eye.

ZWO Seestar S50 smart scope

Using the Seestar, I was able to shoot this panorama. I used a combination of Planetary mode to obtain 2 exposures for the Moon to create the HDR Moon, and then used Scenery mode to finish the remaining 6 panels so that I would also capture the planet Venus as well as the visible star field around the Moon, including Regulus in the lower right. The sun was rising so I had to move quickly as the star field soon faded. I then stitched the panels together manually in Photoshop where I also blended in the final HDR Moon.