Category: Colored Pencil

Splendid Conjunction

conjunction

Last Conjunction of 2008, December 31st
Sketch and Details by Giorgio Bonacorsi

Hi Astronomy Sketchers! All o.k.? I’m o.k.,before great Christmas dinner.The weather was bad for two week,i’m depressed,i don’t have chance to observe last conjunction of 2008. But the 31 december…..the miracle! The sky was clear and blue, i observe the Moon at 4,00 p.m. with my bino 10×50 and i see the bright point of Venus ! Wonderfull vision! I take my 80mm refractor and made Moon’s sketch at 47x, before i made one sketch of Venus with orange filter. I can see,in very low position, Jupiter and Mercury and made that panoramic sketch with my eyes, just in time. The clouds cover the sky in few secods and stay today up my head!
Thankyou for all.I hope like you my sketch.
At next,Giorgio Bonacorsi.

Site:Pergola,Marche Region,Center Italy,31 December 2008
Time:5,30 p.m.
Instrument:naked eyes
Seeing:Good
Temperature:Cold,humidity.

Tilt of the Brim

Saturn

Saturn
Sketch and Details by Paul Abel

Hi there,

My name is Paul Abel and I’m a visual amateur astronomer here in Leicester UK. I produce all my observations by sketching and a recent Jupiter sketch of mine will be appearing in the Stargazerslounge.com calendar for 2009. I was wondering if you’d like some of my sketches for your website? It’s really good to see a website in astronomy devoted to sketching; we have plenty devoted to CCD!

I have enclosed a Saturn sketch as an example. Sadly, it is not one of my best, but it is the only one I can lay my hands on at the moment!!!

Regards,

-Paul.

Webmaster’s note: Thanks Paul, this sketch is lovely, and by all means, we would very much enjoy featuring your sketches!
-Rich Handy

My Favorite Mars

Mars Map

A Mars Map, representing a complilation of Mars sketches Opposition 2007,2008
Sketches and Details by Kris Smet

In January I posted the sketches I managed to make up to then, later I added 7 more sketches and tried to make a marsmap based on my them. Just when I felt I was getting familiar with the various martian features on the disk, the opposition was rapidly coming to an end. I can’t choose any one sketch as my ‘favourite’ but it would have to be the last one then. It was my first, and ironically also last, view of the sinus sabaeus region of that opposition. Luckily the seeing was good and I was able to make a decent observation. The later sketches are also less crude but have a more soft finish, which i’ve been struggling to do from the beginning.

Mars sketches 2007 2008

Mars sketches Opposition 2007,2008
by Kris Smet

My earlier report from January:

I started observing Mars early in July to make the most of the opposition in December when the planet’s disk reached almost 16“. However the first few sketches may not look like much, I believe making the sketches helped me gain more experience
over the months. Putting the colour of mars on paper was much harder than I thought it would be, I’ve tried a few different colours but kept changing them because I wasn’t completely happy with it. The last sketch in my opinion looks most as how
Mars appears to my eye in the scope. (All sketches were done with my 8” f/5 reflector on equatorial mount btw, I didn’t took the tube from the dobson base until October though.)

All sketches are made outside sitting at the scope, with plain A4 printer-paper on a clipboard on my lap. After the scope is brought back inside I work the sketch out with colours and scan them in on my computer. The only ‘processing’ I (sometimes) do
is adjusting the brightness and sharpness levels a bit to look a bit more eyepiece-like.

If you look very closely you can see the small disappearing south polar cap on the first 5 sketches, after that I couldn’t detect it anymore. During September and the first part of October the north polar hood appeared bluish to me, but it seemed to disappeared and on the 14 October sketch the hood doesn’t show any blue. While Mars was showing me it’s so called ‘boring side’ during September and October (accept 5/10 & 31/10) I had the impression that the area south of mare Sirenum, Cimmerium and Mare Tyrrherium was brighter and more yellow than the desert plains laying south of them. In December I had some very good views of the Syrtis Major region in which I could see some detail. I had to wait until early 2008 to get my first view of the Solis
Lacus region, because whenever this side was facing earth I was clouded out :p

I hope to get more viewing time during January, February and perhaps March to make another ‘collage’ of Mars sketches.)

Solar Prominence – October 10, 2008

Solar Prominences

Solar Prominence
Sketch and Details by Jeff Young

My permanent pier is a bit high for this time of year (when the sun is so low to the horizon), so I had to rotate the binocular head a bit to see through it. The sketch orientation therefore doesn’t match the sun graphic (courtesy of Tilting Sun by Les Cowley) in the upper right.

I’ve only been doing solar sketches for about 6 months now, but this was definitely the most fun to sketch so far. Conditions were pretty poor (with seeing alternating between bad and horrible, and transparency not much better), but there was gobs of detail to take in and try to reproduce.

White Derwent Graphitint pencil on black Artagain paper. Solarscope 70mm h-alpha filter / Tele Vue Pronto / Astro-Physics Barlow / Baader MkV binoviewer / Tele Vue 19mm Panoptics / Astro-Physics 400QMD equatorial mount. 10-Oct-2008; 10:20UT; County Louth, Ireland.

Solar Awakening

H-Alpha Sun

Solar Prominences
Sketch and Details by Les Cowley

After weeks of inactivity the sun stirred at the end of September ’08. The 28th saw a huge but faint prominence on the Southeast limb and the next morning revealed two large and bright prominences almost diametrically opposite each other on the SE and Northern limbs. They are pictured here as viewed from England through a Coronado 60mm H-Alpha single-stacked telescope at 50 and 80X. The sketches were made at the eyepiece with Derwent Studio, Watercolour (dry) and Drawing pencils on black Canford paper. A black hood blocked out extraneous light. Each had to be finished within 10 minutes because the prominences, particularly the southern one, were evolving quickly.

Eclipse’s Delicate Blossom

2008 Eclipse

Total Solar Eclipse – August 2, 2008
Sketch by Serge Vieillard

Serge Vieillard made this sketch of the total solar eclipse of 2008 from the Gobi Desert in China. In the minutes leading up to totality, clouds threatened to hide the event from his eyes. He raced 1000 meters from his initial location to find a clear spot, only to have the clouds drift there as well. In the final moments however, the clouds broke and he was able to spend an ecstatic 2 minutes drawing the view through his Kowa TSN-2 77 mm spotting scope at 20X. As the seconds passed and his eyes adapted, he crafted the increasingly complex, asymmetrical contours of the Solar corona and noted a bright star in Cancer. During the final few seconds of totality, the pink bloom of a prominence emerged and topped off an exciting and memorable observation.

Hands to Claim Unbounded Night

M42 and M43

 

The Great Orion Nebula, M42 and M43
By Serge Vieillard

This color drawing of the Great Orion Nebula was created by Serge 
Vieillard during a trip to the Libyan desert to view the Solar 
Eclipse of March 2006. Serge created this colored pencil drawing as a 
negative on white paper and inverted it after scanning to create the 
positive image seen here. In order to get the colors correct for this 
inverted image, he did extensive testing beforehand so he had the 
correct complimentary colors in his sketching supplies (an orange 
pencil for the blue-green hues, and a green pencil for the rose 
colored areas). Serge spent two hours illustrating this magnificent 
nebula. He notes that two hours was not nearly enough to sufficiently 
capture all of the fine detail visible.

The Many Faces of Mars

Mars collage

Mars opposition 2007-2008
By Kris Smet

I started observing Mars early in July to make the most of the opposition in
December when the planet’s disk reached almost 16“. However the first few sketches
may not look like much, I believe making the sketches helped me gain more experience
over the months. Putting the colour of mars on paper was much harder than I thought
it would be, I’ve tried a few different colours but kept changing them because I
wasn’t completely happy with it. The last sketch in my opinion looks most as how
mars appears to my eye in the scope. (All sketches were done with my 8” f/5
reflector on equatorial mount btw, I didn’t took the tube from the dobson base until
October though.)

All sketches are made outside sitting at the scope, with plain A4 printer-paper on a
clipboard on my lap. After the scope is brought back inside I work the sketch out
with colours and scan them in on my computer. The only ‘processing’ I (sometimes) do
is adjusting the brightness and sharpness levels a bit to look a bit more
eyepiece-like.

If you look very closely you can see the small disappearing south polar cap on the
first 5 sketches, after that I couldn’t detect it anymore. During September and the first part of October the north polar hood appeared bluish to me, but it seemed to disappeared and on the 14 October sketch the hood doesn’t show any blue.

While Mars was showing me it’s so called ‘boring side’ during September and October
(accept 5/10 & 31/10) I had the impression that the area south of mare Sirenum,
Cimmerium and Mare Tyrrherium was brighter and more yellow than the desert plains
laying south of them.

In December I had some very good views of the Syrtis Major region in which I could
see some detail. I had to wait until early 2008 to get my first view of the Solis
Lacus region, because whenever this side was facing earth I was clouded out :p
 
I hope to get more viewing time during January, February and perhaps March to make
another ‘collage’ of Mars sketches.