I’d been waiting for about 3 weeks for the moon to be high in the sky again at a reasonable hour after dark. Tonight was the night! I really hadn’t planned to spend as much time out there as I did so I never bothered to set up the AutoStar or align my scope. I just plopped it on the patio and manually pointed it.

The 11.5 day old waxing gibbous moon was insanely bright and brilliantly crisp. I hope one day I am able to more accurately capture things the way I see them in the eyepiece. But instead, this is what I got tonight.

As I said, I hadn’t set up the AutoStar so I wasn’t tracking so the pictures were a little more blurred than they probably could have been. I will say that even the best of them does not even come close to being representative of how I saw it with the naked eye.