We're about a week away from the closest approach of Mars from Earth. I went out to Cattle Point around 9 PM and saw a number of planets. Venus I saw early on to the west over some trees as it was about to go out of view. All the labelled planets I was able to observe with the exception of Pluto the dwarf planet which I had to review a planetarium program to determine where it was in the star field.

I outlined where the Sagittarius Teapot was and Antares and Scorpius.

Venus was 61% illuminated so appeared similar to a quarter moon. Jupiter displayed a fairly crisp view with the four Galilean moons visible early in the evening. The view of Saturn was somewhat unstable but I was able to see the Cassini division and the orientation of the rings with respect to the globe. Mars was amusingly red as it was rising from the horizon just before 10 PM due to the its low altitude. At the end of the evening there were passable views and I believe some detail though low contrast.

Some Mars statistics for the night.
Visual Magnitude: -2.7
Apparent Size: 24.0 arcseconds
Illumination: 99.7%
Distance: 58.3 million km.
Altitude: 9 degrees 9 minutes 8.9 seconds above the horizon.

All my observations were made with a Televue 76 with 7mm and 11 mm Delite eyepieces and a Televue 2.5x Powermate.

Camera: Nikon D810
Lens: Nikkor 8-15 Fisheye Zoom set at 15mm
Sensor ISO: 800
Exposure: 6 seconds at f/6.3