The crescent lunar disk, setting in the West, with lovely Venus nearby, two jewels in the early evening sky. As seen in Northern California, on 20090227.

Taken with a tripod-mounted 200mm telephoto lens + 2X teleconverter, on a Canon EOS 1D Mark III body. 5 images were exposed at 1/3 EV apart as RAW, then stored in Aperture. Aperture was then used to export 16-bit TIFF images. Before HDR processing in Photomatix, to provide cleaner luminance input, less chroma noise, and deep black backgrounds, the 16-bit TIFF images were processed through Noise Ninja. Subsequently, the denoised TIFF images were composited into a HDR photo with Photomatix Pro, using the Details Enhancer tone-mapping feature. Adjustments were made to dampen numerous splotchy noise results, and then to retain details of the edge of the Moon. Venus is extremely bright right now, and so it was overexposed in every photo I took, a fact I didn't see until later, alas.

Final post-work was done in Light Zone, starting with a recentering crop of the Moon and Venus within the 1D Mark III frame. Light Zone was specifically used to bring up the full contrast of the lunar disk with a zone mapper, and to increase the edge definition using the Clarity effect. A second zone mapper was used to fill in the much smaller outline of the crescent-shaped Venus. The interior of Venus went to black in HDR, because every single photo input to Photomatix was overexposed in the center. Only the crescent outline of the planet was retained well in the HDR.