The Sagittarius stellar cloud, also known as M24, is one of the most dense patches of the Milky Way. It’s 600 lightyears across and some of the stars you can perceive through a decent pair of binoculars lie more than 10.000 lightyears deep into our galaxy, straight towards its core. It would have been impossible to draw all individual stars. Not just because there were so many that they rather appeared like a genuine cloud across my field of view but also because they were so faint that you’d constantly wonder whether you’d seen an individual star or not. A nice detail is the pretty little cluster M18 by the top border of the field of view, another one of these “jewel boxes” in the sky.
I made this sketch in my backyard in the Italian mountains with my Nexus 100 binoculars and a pair of Siebert 21mm Ultrawide eyepieces (24x). Pencil on white paper and then processed in Photoshop.
Cheers!
Peter
