Early on the morning of February 18, 2020 the moon passed in front of Mars to create the scene here. Fortunately the moon was well positioned between the Lagoon and Trifid nebulae creating a dramatic but very high contrast scene.
My wife and I camped out in the Northern Arizona desert the night before so that I could have the telescope set up and ready for the 4:45 AM start. Clouds interfered with the beginning of the event but cleared in time to catch Mars emerging from behind the moon.
The image here is a composite of the moon and Mars in a single frame with enough background stars to properly align it to the background. The background was photographed in a combination of RGB, Ha and Oiii narrowband and OSC to reveal the rich hydrogen cloud hiding behind the moon. The background was captured more than a year later from my backyard in Southwest Utah where I only have about a one hour window of opportunity when the Lagoon Nebula is visible.
That's a beautiful composite Craig! We actually were trying to get the moon and the lagoon together a few days ago with our widefield refractor when it passed *somewhat* close to the nebula (July 23) but sadly it was too cloudy. Glad to know you actually used the stars to properly align the two images and didn't just stick the moon on there at random :D Beautiful sense of scale.