Playing with the camera tonight

Orion, the Moon, the Pleiades & Venus, which is about to duck behind a tree.  
Jupiter has already set.  Nipping at Orion's heals is our rhododendron. 

(Click for larger image)

The western sky looked really cool this evening so I tried to capture it with the good camera.  I even dragged out the tripod for the occasion.  This shot is from the second group.  The first batch were shot at ISO 400.  Oleg mentioned a while back that image quality is better with the camera set at the lower ISO so I thought I'd give it a try.  It seems to have helped.  This is from the JPEG version because I still don't have any editing software that can work with RAW images.  As you can see in the enlarged version, I was fighting a high haze that could hardly be seen with the naked eye.  That thing that looks like a scratch underlining Orion and disappearing into our rhododendron is actually an airplane that flew by during the exposure.

Canon Rebel XT, Canon 18~55mm at 18mm, 30 seconds at F5.6, ISO 100
The camera was mounted on a Slick Master Series tripod.
The only post processing (in Microsoft Photo Editor) was to increase the gamma slightly.