View from front porch

I love the ecliptic. It makes me feel connected to the rest of the solar system. As I stare at a planet's progress along it through the night (and through several nights) I can feel the earth rotating.

Jupiter, Venus, and the new moon--if you click on it to make it bigger, you can see the crescent and the "dark side" lit up by earthlight. If I were a little earlier, I would have gotten Mercury. No tripod, just propped on a post. Here's a different exposure (same shutter speed, but top is with the ISO maxed out, the bottom with lower ISO but some manipulation in the program Aperture). Which do you like better?