The San Francisco Bay area has a population of over seven million people and the light pollution to go with it. I was expecting rainy weather and just tossed my point and shoot camera in my bag. When the skies cleared with visibility of over 40 miles, the views were spectacular. This image of Orion, Taurus, and the Pleiades was made with a Sony RX100, 2.7 crop factor, point and shoot camera using a napkin as a tripod. Exposed at ISO 800, F2.2, for 10 sec fl 10.4mm. The waning gibbous Moon was up for about an hour when I stepped outside for a quick image. All I had for a tripod was my dinner napkin, so I took a couple of test shots to get my framing right. I used dynamic background extraction from Pixinsight to minimize the skyglow gradient and stretched the image in Photoshop.

Earlier in the evening I captured this shot with Venus over San Francisco. I steadied the camera against a post for this ISO 400 image exposed for 1/15 sec at f3.5 and 10.4mm focal length.

The 1:1 crop below of the Golden Gate Bridge portion of this image shows the Farallon Islands through the Golden Gate, 43 miles away.

Later in the evening, we can bring out the stars with Venus over San Francisco using a masked exposure stretch in Photoshop.