I’m a night owl. Almost an all night night owl. Lately it’s been about 5 am before I get to bed. I’d rather be getting up at that hour, but even with enough sleep, my body doesn’t like to get up that early. Well, actually the body doesn’t like to leave dreamworld any time, but that’s a different subject.

Some of the things I love about the night are the peace and quiet, the train whistle, the cool and fragrance in the warm months and occasionally this:

I am so amazed at this photo. My phone normally has difficulty getting a decent shot of the moon. But this isn’t the moon. It’s Venus. Magnification was as high as it goes and my hand was not entirely steady for any of the photos.

At first I thought it might be the space station, but I looked it up and that was in the north sky at that time. This was in the southeast–right where the sky maps say Venus should be at that time. When I turned off the light by my chair and looked up, there it was. Although much smaller looking and not a circle or sphere to the naked eye, it seemed as bright as the moon, and unlike the moon it was twinkly.

My phone was in my hand, so I thought “Why not?” At first my flash was on and I thought all I got was flash reflection from the window. It took two tries to finally get the flash off, but even they manage a faint capture. This is the better of the two with auto color adjustment.

I don’t understand the splotchiness. At first I thought it might be branches, but in that line of sight any branches should be to the far left and right of the larger photo above (this one is a crop). I assume it’s a lens, lens-through-window sort of issue. Maybe dirty windows?

This is the first photo above, cropped with auto color adjustment. It gives a better idea of the brightness though not enough and no twinkle.

Below are the other two “good” photos I took.

Being neither an astronomer, nor a photographer, I can only guess, but I think the different looks are due to my unsteady hand.

It still boggles me that something that looks like this to the naked eye…

… ends up photographing like this:

instead of this: