On the evening of April 11/08 I was out doing a little high power observing of the Moon with my 6 inch dob when I noticed a very bright star very close to the Moon. I nudged the scope a tad to the east and suddenly realized that the bright "star" was actually Mars. From my perspective it didn't look like there would be an occultation but there would at least be a very close "fly by". This at was around 2130hrs PDST

I quickly set up my little ED 80 refractor, attached my son's Canon Digital Rebel XTi, took a few out of focus shots and then watched the sky cloud over. Being the optimist that I am, I left everything set up.

Shortly after 2300 hrs I was rewarding with the sky becoming perfectly clear. The Moon Mars shot on the left was the best of the bunch that I managed to capture using the refractor/Rebel setup and was taken around 2330hrs.

I've never been comfortable with focusing that camera so I then went and got my wife's old point and shoot Canon PowerShot S50. The Moon Mars shot on the right was done shooting that camera through a 22 superwide Lanthanum eyepiece and my f/8 6 inch dob. I flipped the shot to give proper orientation. This image was taken just a little after midnight.

I've combined the two to show the apparent movement over that time period. I doesn't give a perfect perspective because my extremely limited processing skills don't allow me to make the size of the Moon the same.