I bought the zoom lens mainly to get some cool Sun and Moon shots from time to time, along with whatever else would come up as a use.  Here is the first Moon and Sun use.  Thanks to spaceweather.com I was alerted to this pairing of the Moon and Venus this night.  I believe they were less than one degree apart.  I held my hand at arms length and the two were seperated by about the width of a finger at that range.  They were close.  Also worth noting on this one, I'm actually house sitting my parent's house(animal sitting basically) while they took a drive to Colorado.  I only learned of this the day before, about 3 hours before they left.  It worked out well as I wind up climbing around on their roof in the middle of the night, lol.  The above shot here was actually taken during daylight.  The Sun had not even set yet.  I could only see the Moon, but decided to take an early shot of it anyway.  As I looked through the lense I could see a bright light next to it.  I was like, what is that a reflection?  I'd take my eye off the camera and just not see it.  Then I finally saw it without the lens.  I bet Venus is pretty hard to find during the day without the Moon as a guide like this.  Obviously you can indeed see the planet before it is dark out.  The pair's close encounter would only get better as the Sun set and the night wore on.  I was happy to see they were about 45 degrees above the horizon at sunset, so there'd be plenty of time to shoot them once it was dark.

I walked up the hill about 30 minutes before the Sun was to set, hoping to get some good telephoto shots of it in the clouds.  Well, once it was down into these clouds it never appeared again.  There looked to be some thinner areas it would show through, but it wasn't to be.  At least I got a few as it sank behind these. A deer to my south about 100 yards interepted the shoot.  I tried to get him, but he went behind some trees as I saw him and never came back out.

I have no idea what kind of bird this is, but it was very noisy.  The sun had set now and it was getting darker, making it a little harder to get a sharp shot of this.  Edit:  I have since recieved a couple e-mails.  It's apparently a Kriders Red-Tailed Hawk.  Thanks!  Or it is an American Kestrel.  Hmmm.

Notice in the first shots during twilight how Venus is left of the Moon.  By the end of the night it would be directly under the Moon.  Anyone that has taken photos of the moon can tell you it blows out very easily.  It's pretty impossible to capture a scene as you see it once it is very dark out.  It'd make for some interesting HDR work I'm sure.  I'm always amazed at how fast it moves when you are using something zoomed in on it.

This is pretty soft, I know.  I need to look through all the images again as I know I have some full sized versions that are sharper.

Anytime you have a crescent moon above the horizon after sunset you can get what is called Earthshine, where reflected light from Earth can illuminate the dark side of the Moon just a bit.  If you allow the crescent to blow out you can begin to see it better.  Note the jet trail above the two.  I was hoping for a better jet allignment at somepoint, but it wasn't happening.

The tought part about putting anything with the moon, is being far enough away from them so you can zoom in on the moon and not zoom past them.  I should have done a few more wider angle shots to show just how close they are to each other(Moon and Venus).

Here is a wide angle view showing how close to one another they were.

Ok, so it is getting dark out now and I'm on the porch shooting this.  Guess who is with me?  Enough mosquitoes to reach from here to the Moon with.  It was horrible.  I'm sure they were all carrying West Nile too.  I had a hooded sweatshirt on(just for them) with the hood up.  Problem was I never brought any jeans and had shorts and sandals on.  So I grabbed a blanket from inside and sat there all covered up but my face and hands.  It really didn't help.  They all just came to my face instead of other spots they could have reached before.  It made shooting pretty much impossible.  If you weren't addressing the little bastards flying around your nose and ears, you were getting bit left and right.  There were enough to go around that they'd even get your hands as you tried to take the shot.  It hasn't been too bad here for the last few years, but this wet spring did us in I think.  There are also tons of ticks this year.  It seems I'm pulling them off my legs each time I'm out there walking the dogs(3 different times one occasion).  So, I had set the ladder up to go onto the roof, so I could get a good angle over the trees as it got lower.  I didn't wait for it to lower and instead just headed up there early.  As I'm climbing the south side I hear boom, boom, boom.  I was like, what was that.  Then I clear the peak and see fireworks!  The town must be testing them this year or something, as one other weekend they were shooting them off.  I was like, well how nice, here I am with my big zoom and I'm on the roof.

A rough guess says I'm 2 miles from where these were being sent up.  I guess 400mm is a bit much, even from this distance.  It was a bit of a challenge getting the focus set right, and finding the right spot.  I was also not even up here to be shooting fireworks.  I farted around with them though, if only to paint the picture for this entry/page.

This one was one of those huge gold ones you see at shows...or at least a corner of it lol.  It kind of looks like some of those cartoony Sun drawings you see on things.  Ain't there a strange looking Sun thing on a CBS morning show?  Anyway...

Not sure what this looks like, but the first thing that comes to mind are those reed thingies with cotton on the end of them?  I'm an idiot I know.

I believe I backed the lens out to 100mm for this one.  Here is what I carried with me up onto this roof.  First off, the house is a one story house, with a basement and garage.  The roof is moderately steep(wish I knew the pitch but I don't) and is a bit taller than a normal floor.  So when you walk over to the peack above the driveway, it's 3 stories up.  It's dark out now so you can't see much, though the cargil plant that sits right/east of this above shot helps a lot.  So, I carried up the blanket, my camera with the 100-400L attached(a big lens), as well as a tripod, my camera bag with my 17-40L in it.  It came to me that I needed to change the lens to shoot some wide angle shots of the Moon.  Oh yeah, it was hard to even shoot as it was, since I was using the blanket to stand on so I'd not have to knee on the shingles.  Problem was I kept sliding down from the peak, as my tripod was right on the peak(no choice).  The moon was easy as it was in line with the peak, while the fireworks were perpendicular to it, meaning I couldn't sit over it/on it to shoot.  It wasn't helping that I was wearing sandals that don't have a back in them. They'd also gotten wet as I jacked around on the ground with the water hose, trying some stupid picture that didn't turn out.  So it was "fun" trying to shoot as it was.  Well what was more "fun" was changing those two lenses in the dark!  I did it 4 times I believe.  It was a bit hard seeing where the red line up dot was, but it was mostly hard keeping things so nothing would get in the lens as I did it, as well as keeping things on my lap.  I'm not sure how I never dropped one lens or the other, or even the camera as it set there on my lap while I had both lenses in my hands.  The only thing keeping the extra lens on the roof was the fartfan vent.  I sure would have hated to see that big zoom go rolling.  A muscle going up the side of my leg and hip kept cramping up as I'd try and sit a certain way to hold the stuff on my lap.  My god those can hurt and be scary.  The one time it felt like I was going to be able to pull back out of it and felt like it wanted to just tear something....a great thing to have happen alone on roof with no one home.

It's sometimes funny how some outings work out.  You set out with this or that in mind, and often low expectations at that.  Then a few things happen and you are just besides yourself with enjoyment of how things are really going.  I did not expect the scene to get very cool once it got dark, as it was.  It was indeed pretty cool to see the two brightest objects in the night sky pair up so close to one another.  I was not expecting fireworks either.  Finally, I was not expecting smoke from the fireworks to add to what I originally set out for.  At first it appeared that was what was happening here.  I took a few shots and was like, dang this scene is freaking sweet now.  It looked more orange visually.  Well I thought, there was cirrus to the northwest, but this just does not look like it's cirrus.  Then I was sure it was the smoke from the fireworks.  The problem was the light southerly breeze wouldn't let that happen.  It would be close, but just didn't seem to line up.  The only way it would work if there was some inversion/front off the surface a ways sending the smoke back west some....which is possible.  I'm not sure which it was, but it looked like smoke, but at the same time seemed unlikely under the conditions.  In the end it doesn't really matter.

Back to some firework photography.

Back to some Moon and Venus fun.  Venus is so close it's hard to even see it here.  I did a few longer exposures to light up the rooftop and trees....and me with my phone that has no one on the other end.  Sad I know.  Why are the treetops brighter?  The lights from the cargil plant.  In reality it was darker out than the left side of the roof looks here.  That roof peak over there is the one above the driveway, WAY off the ground.  I'm not a fan of heights.  I did a couple standing up over there and wasn't too excited about the long exposure to get it.  These were 30 second exposures that I had to hold still during.  Well one didn't even work as I was using the timer and had been using mirror lock up too.  With mirror lockup you have to push the cable release once to lock up the mirror then again to start the exposure.  Well, if you used the timer so you could be in the shot when it started it didn't work the same.  Those it just started the shot.  I think what I goofed up was having it on bulb the one time instead of 30 seconds.  However it worked, it didn't take the picture.  I think because it was on bulb instead of 30 seconds.  With the timer on and mirror lockup you only have to hit the button once, and it starts pretty soon after...unless it is on bulb I think.  Anyway, I can't recall exactly how that worked when I screwed up, but I stood there near the peak facing away and wasn't liking it.  I thought 30 seconds had to have been up but never heard the shutter close.  I go back to the camera and it never even started!  Doh.  I was like, I stood there by the peak in the dark that whole time for nothing.  The barely noticeable white area above the middle of the trees is from the car dealership on the west side of town.....Woodhouse Ford....it's huge.

One of the last shots of the long night.  I'd been shooting for a good 2 and a half hours now and was ready to get down, even if the Moon hadn't reached that treeline yet.  Notice now Venus is almost directly below the Moon, compared to being almost straight left of it to start.  I ain't too up on Moon rise/set times, etc, but it seems that some periods it is setting an hour later each day, so that little bit is the reason for this change in location from one another.....since it might seem like a lot from these zoomed in views, but from more normal views it's not so much. Oh and I almost forgot.  The mosquitoes were MUCH improved on the roof, since there was a light southerly breeze.  I only recall one.