I had a nice view from the back of the porthong bus as I rode home from work this evening. The Moon along with a very bright planet above it were visible just above dark clouds which were, in turn, above a beautiful orange and red sunset. Unfortunately, the bus was moving too fast and never got stopped by a traffic light so I was unable to take a photo until I got off at my stop. By then, the sunset had faded to dark blue and the celestial bodies were hidden behind buildings.

I was finally able to snap a few photos with my phone once I got to Thalang Road with a Sino-Portuguese style shophouse below. I am reasonable sure that the bright object above the Moon is Venus although it could also be either Saturn or Jupiter. Please let me know in the comments below if you can enlighten me; a quick Google search didn’t yield a definitive answer….

I was a bit surprised that I managed a halfway decent photo of the night sky using my very basic Realme C2 phone (which boasts a dual rear camera made up of a 13MP sensor with f/2.2 aperture lens and 2MP depth sensor with f/2.4 aperture lens.

The second photo used about 50 percent zoom via an app on the phone. I can even see the shape of the unlit portion of the Moon. Too bad I didn’t have this camera during the last eclipse. Of course, that one was probably obscured by clouds anyway. Most of the truly cool astronomical events seem to be when they occur here and I remember to look up to the sky….

Bonus photos. A couple of Limelight Avenue shopping center this evening as I walked past…

More about the current nighttime sky, from EarthSky.org:

New moon came at 07:43 UTC on December 4, 2021. By the evening of December 6, the young waxing crescent is back in the evening sky. From that evening through at least the evening of December 9, you can see spectacularly beautiful scenes in the sky after sunset, as the moon sweeps up away from the sun in our sky, passing first Venus, then Saturn, then Jupiter. Two of these (Venus and Jupiter) are the brightest planets. They’ll be incredibly noticeable with the moon!

And the moon itself, softly glowing with earthshine, will be showing mysterious markings on its night side.

EarthSky.org