Artificial Reality

Here’s tonight’s crescent moon, with Venus in the lower right corner.  Venus is red because she’s close to the horizon.

This is actually Photoshopped.  The reason it’s Photoshopped is that my new Canon hardly ever manages to focus properly on a distant object sitting in the sky.  If only I could focus manually . . .

Anyway, I zoomed in on the moon and got a more in-focus view:

You should be able to view the moon’s entire disk, though the dark part is quite faint.  I snipped out the in-focus crescent moon, then after adjusting for size pasted it over the out-of-focus moon on the first photo.

The result is that after working with a highly complex piece of software and creating an artificial image, I now have a picture of what I actually saw in the sky.