During September 2003 Mars was closer than it had been, or would be, for many years. Lack of a telescope was no reason to avoid taking photos anyway! And on September 12th, the sky was mostly clear, and the moon was not too close to Mars.
Mars is the bright dot near the middle of this photo, taken from my patio, looking roughly SSE. This was an 8 second exposure, and some of the brighter spots are camera defects, not stars.
Another long exposure, but this time with telephoto lens. The light circle on the right hand side is actually the moon, whose light was shining on the lens, and that image of the moon is due to reflection within the lens. This was the best photo of Mars that I could take.
A blurry moon. I could not get a clear photo of the moon - even manually setting the focal length to infinity as this photo used, did not solve the problem.
2003