Using the brightest star of Mirfak in the constellation Perseus, it was easy to find the surrounding star field known as “Melotte 20” or “Collinder 39”, the Alpha Persei Cluster field is beautiful. Once fully in focus, the first thing I said was, “Wow.”
Object: Alpha Persei Cluster
Date: February 8th, 2014 – 9:30 – 10:30pm CT
Location: New Braunfels, Texas – back yard
Conditions: 42°F, clear with waxing gibbous moon
Instruments: 10×50 Wide-Angle Binoculars
Medium: Graphite on white sketch paper, inverted
Object name: NGC 3372 and NGC 3293
Object type: Emission nebula and open cluster
Location: Bogotá, Colombia
Date: January 04, 2014
Media: Digital sketch with adobe photoshop CS2, based on a graphite pencil sketch
Equipment: Celestron astromaster 130EQ, 25mm and 10mm eyepieces
Seeing conditions: moonless, transparency 2/3, Antoniadi III, Bortle 8.
Hello all,
At the end of 2013 I had the opportunity to look once again to a clear southern sky so I decided to go for it in the first days of January. On the early morning of January 4th I went to the whole nebula, this time, through my telescope view.
It was just an amazing view that I could only sketch approximately 80% of the stars I could resolved. I am just concern about the star Eta Carinae: all the information I got about it says that it is a blue variable giant. I´m not sure why is classified like that, if in true it looks like a red giant.
Object Name: NGC5139-NGC104-M13
Object Type: globular clusters
Location: Namibia
Date: August, 2nd 2013
Media: graphite pencil for the initial draft then scan and digital work for the final sketch.
Instrument: Home-made 14″ travel-scope, F/D 5, dobsonian. Eyepiece 20mm Plössl. Field 34′.
Observing conditions: Slight turbulence, good transparency, no light pollution.
Comment:
Under the wonderful sky of Namibian desert, one of the dryest and darkest of the world, I’ve foolishly decided to draw the 3 big.
Scaring idea for a sketcher, as the globular clusters are known for being undrawable. Obviously the idea was not to spot each star, but only to make a rendering comparison of these 3 big, mainly interesting for northern observers who have not often the possibility to look at those famous southern globular clusters in Centauri and Tucanae constellations. With the same instrument, the same night and the same duration of the observation (half an hour each), Omega Centauri and 47 Tucanae are bright and deeply resolved, whereas the Herculis cluster looks like a fuzzy patch of light grains. Poor dethroned cluster!
Hope it tickles your traveller spirit!
I wish ASOD’s team a happy new year and clear skys!
Object Name NGC 6231
Object Type Open Cluster
Location Brasília-DF, Brazil
Date: October 12th, 2013 5:05 UT
Media 2HB graphite pencil on white paper, scanned and processed with GIMP
Instrument: 120mm f/5 refractor + 15mm (24x)
‘m sure that most of my fellow astronomy artists will agree with me when I say that the most challenging objects to draw are complex open clusters. There are just so many stars filling the FOV that it’s nearly impossible to draw them all and most of the time motivation’s already gone before you’ve actually started drawing. But this time I persevered and after more than two hours behind the eyepiece I think that I’ve more or less caught everything that I saw. Well, probably not though because after such a long observation time my head was literally spinning. But here it is:
– Object: M37
– Location: Carù, Italy (province of Reggio Emilia), elevation 770m
– Date: 06 Dec 2013 – 20:15 UTC (start of observation…)
– Media: Ordinary graphite pencil on white paper, followed by several hours of elaboration on the PC
– Equipment: 18″ f/4,45 home-made PeterDob (Galaxy optics), 40mm Siebert VP Echelon 2″ binoviewer and a couple of 24mm Explore Scientific 82° eyepieces (no OCA), resulting in a mag of 85x
– Conditions: fairly cold but the sky was wonderfully transparent. No seeing measured, limit visual mag +/- 6,3
Object Name : NGC 2451
Object Type: Open Cluster
Location: Miramar, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Date 23-11-2013
Media : graphite pencil 2H and 2B, scumble, white paper, edited with GIMP 2.
Intrumental: Binocular Braun 12×50
The night was very dark and quite. Luckily, there was no wind and i went outside with the determination to draw one of my favourites open clusters. I always spend a lot of time watching this beautiful object. I really enjoyed it!! Thank you so much!
Hey I send my sketch of M2. This is one of my favourite objects of this type. M2 can be found in the constellation Aquarius. I have this zodiac sign 🙂 Sketch was made during today’s observations.The dark rural skies and a good telescope nicely break the cluster into individual stars.
I used a 2B pencil and black pen.
I greet:)
Object name: M2
Object type: globular cluster
Date: July 23, 2012
Location: Psary in Poland
Telescope: Newton 8 “aperture (200/1200)
Media: Black pen and pencil 2B
