Category: Chalk

Lunar Crater Gassendi

Crater Gassendi - 31 January 2015
Crater Gassendi – 31 January 2015

Hi all,

tonight I had a look outside and – yeah, no clouds and clear skies.

So I took out the 10″ f/5 truss dobsonian and prepared for lunar sketching: Today the floor-fractured crater Gassendi attracted me and presented nice central peaks and its rimae on its ground.

Telescope: 10″ f/5 Martini Dobsonian

Eyepiece: Skywatcher Planetary 5mm

Date & Time: Jan 31st, 2015 / 1925-2015 CET

Place: home terrace, Dusseldorf region, Germany

Technique: chalk, charcoal and white pastel on black sketching cardbox paper

Hope you like the sketch.

Clear skies!

Achim

Comparison of Two Sketches of Atlas and Hercules

Atlas and Hercules
Atlas and Hercules

Yesterday evening I could sketch the wonderful pair of craters Atlas and Hercules with charcoal and chalk on black cardbox. This was the second sketch I did of these craters. I had a look into my archive and compared the current sketch with the one done on May last year.

Both sketches have been done with my 5” Celestron MAK. What we can see is the different lighting conditions based on moon age and libration. Furthermore, the seeing conditions last time have been much better than yesterday – I could not go up to 300x yesterday but had to leave it with the 7mm EP.

Clear skies!

Achim

NGC 2244

NGC 2244
NGC 2244

The real difficulty with this sketch was not to see the object in the eyepiece, but mostly the cold temperature (below -20C with humidity and wind). Unfortunately I couldn’t see the nebula, probably mostly due to its large apparent dimension

Object Name: NGC 2244
Object Type: Open Cluster
Location: St-Elzéar, Québec
Date: December 30th, 2011
Media: white chalk on dark blue paper, scanned black and white
Instrument: Meade 16″ + 50mm Eyepiece
Weather: uncovered and cold !

Louise Racine