Thursday, 6 April 2017, was partly cloudy. A bobcat came by for a drink of water:

That evening I attended the monthly meeting of the Oracle Dark Skies Committee.

Friday, 7 April, was mostly cloudy with increasing winds. That evening I attended a volunteer appreciation event at Oracle State Park. Ssturday, 8 April, was also mostly cloudy and windy.

I used the iOS app PhotoPills to determine the optimum date/time to photograph the waxing gibbous Moon setting behind Picacho Peak, 31 miles west of Cassiopeia Observatory. The app determined that would be Sunday morning, 9 April. These iPhone screen shots show the PhotoPills planning screens I used:

I woke up early Sunday and took the Nikon D7200 DSLR with Tamron 150-600mm lens outside. I could see some thin clouds in the western sky.

Since weather had prevented observing the planet Jupiter at opposition on 7 April I decided to grab a quick photo of the planet and its four Galilean Moons as seen using a focal length of 600mm:

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The star to the upper left of Jupiter is Theta Virginis.

This cropped FL 600mm image of the Moon was taken at 0456 MST:

This sequence of cropped FL 600mm photos begins at 0515 MST and ends at 0520 MST:

Unfortunately, the clouds along the western horizon prevented capturing the silhouette of Picacho Peak against the setting Moon. I will try again at some future oppportunity.

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