Were you out last night to see the Moon and Mars together? It was a lovely get-together! I took some pictures, and here's the best one:
Mars is the reddish "star" to the left of the Moon. A couple of actual stars are visible as well, and the pink blob on the left is a reflection of the Moon inside the camera. Funny, you can barely see Mars in the picture, but it was really obvious by eye. That's because cameras see things linearly -- an object twice as luminous as another will appear twice as bright in a picture -- while our eyes see things logarithmically -- a mathematical function that lets our eyes see a much larger range of brightness based on multiplication, not addition. It's actually a bit more complicated than this, but the point is while to the camera the Moon was vastly brighter than Mars ...
