Attached is a sketch of a Bolide meteor observed on the evening of 1-16-2015. I was setting up to image Comet Lovejoy in Cumberland, VA when it appeared. It was near full moon brightness and colors were quite vivid to the naked eye! I nicknamed it “All American Meteor” for its colors! I used colored pencils and Photoshop CS2.
I enjoy your site.
Randy Tatum
Henrico, VA USA
Object Name (Geminids)
Object Type (Meteor shower )
Location (Provence France)
Date (14 dec 2013)
Media (graphite pencil, watercolor, white paper, digital inversion )
From 4UT just after the moonset, I was observing one hour looking around the Leo area.
I begin to sketch the sky region where I was looking, +/- 45° from the radiant. We can see the Leo and the red Mars underneath.
Each time a meteor was burning out I put the trace on my white paper link with the estimated magnitude. Let says one minute after, because already years ago, I realized that sometime a meteor is following shortly by another one, just on the same track, like a double meteor. This morning I saw 42 Geminids and 2 sporadic’s, I don’t sketch the sporadic meteor here. The speed was quite low and the magnitudes quite brilliant.
The small village where I’m don’t care about light pollution, ok then, I use this to sketch the Christmas street decoration like it is.
Here follows my result of the watch,
December 14, 2013 (Val d’Issole, France)
Longitude 006 degrees 05′ 25″ East,
Latitude 43 degrees 18′ 15″ North.
UT Period Field Teff LM GEM SPO
4:00-5:05 60SSE 1.00 5.20 42 2
Total Meteors: 44
Magnitude Distributions:
Shower -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5
GEM 0 0 2 4 5 5 6 10 8 2 0
SPO 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
Based on this, my ZHR observation reaches 250!
It was a nice watch, a wonderful spectacle indeed.
Clear sky to you all
Michel Deconinck
http://astro.aquarellia.com/
Object Name: Meteor
Object Type: Perseid
Location: Sketched at a dark sky sight in Bristol, UK
Date: 13th August 2013; 00:40am; conditions – very good
Media (graphite pencil sketch and then digitized using graphics tablet and Photoshop)
I usually sketch in some detail (mainly HB and 2B). I then scanned the result into Photoshop and sharpened the sketch.
Observing Details
Had intended to spend an evening under dark skies watching the Perseids. Started out at 11:30pm but after numerous bright meteors over the next hour or so I decided it might be worth trying to accurately sketch one. This meteor came out of Cassiopeia and headed towards Andromeda Galaxy and broke in two as it trailed away. Frustratingly while I was sketching the background stars (and looking down) my pad was illuminated by a flash and on glancing up I realised I had missed a monster heading towards Pegasus – I could see the smoking trail for a good 2 secs. Suffering for my art? Perhaps!!
Hope you enjoy,
Clear Skies
Chris Lee
Object Name (Just a Perseid)
Object Type (Falling star and star party)
Location (Sainte Anastasie sur Issole – Provence)
Date (august 11th 2013)
Media (watercolour on 300gr paper – dim : 25cm/65cm)
The national star night, august 10th 2013 with AFA (Astronomical French Association)
At night, a lot of curious, tourist or passionate are join us under thousands of stars, fixed or falling.
A storyteller playing Celtic harp tells children “how they tried to assassinate Jupiter.” Another storyteller playing bagpipe tells the strange story of the constellations, the gods who watch us from the sky. A dozen of telescopes were in place, including a real antiquity made before the first edition of the Messier catalogue… Workshop were organised around magnitudes and star colours. Children dancing as orbited around our big model of Jupiter and its four main moons…
All this achieved thanks to the Sainte Anastasie’s municipality, turned off the lights around our observation field.
For all of us, this night was,… an astronomical success!
Michel Deconinck
Object Name :Perseus Meteor
Location :Iran .51°31’48.65″E 28°54’35.83″N
Date :2012/8/12
Media :pastel and black paper
Object Name: Perseids
Object Type: Annular meteor shower
Location: Lochem, The Netherlands
Date: August 12, 2012
Media: Black and white pastel (pencil) on navy blue paper
The peak of the Perseid meteor shower occurs at noon from my longitude, so the best period to observe the meteors would this morning before dawn. I took a comfortable chair and my sketching materials to my favorite observing site to sketch as much meteors as possible. At the eve of my obseving session I already prepared the layout for the sketch: a starry sky (with the brightest stars as visible around the observing time) and a bit of a horizon. At the site I drew the meteors and the fainter stars at the right position.
Despite it was still hours before the real maximum, it was a spectacle! A lot of bright meteors, some with smoke trails. Sadly I missed some of the brightest because I was busy sketching a fainter one…
Clear skies!
Roel Weijenberg
www.roelblog.nl
Object Name (Perseids)
Object Type (Shower)
Location (Néoules Provence France)
Date (6 – 12 august 2012)
Media (graphite pencil, white paper, inverted with paint.net)
Here join a sketch I made during the Perseid activity, from august 6th ‘till the morning of august 12th. In fact it’s a sketch compilation of all traces I observed.
From the meteors collected (6.5h observation time), I made a small animation video : http://youtu.be/VrthFcEU4cg
Clear sky to you all !
Michel Deconinck
Site Web: http://www.aquarellia.com
January 23, 2012 at 7:37 p.m. local time, I saw this meteor fall. It seemed to fall on the castle of Forcalqueiret in Provence, already so ruined …
This meteor belongs to the sporadic family, no known shower exist at this time of the year. Slow, it has about 3 seconds to disintegrate by emitting a beautiful ocher yellow light.
My sketch was made naked eye in the cold of this early winter evening. We can see the sky from the Pleiades to the feet of Orion, passing through the Hyades in the constellation Taurus. I tried to take account of different colors like Betelgeuse and Rigel, respectively red and blue. The Great Nebula in Orion also shows a little pink shade than the surrounding stars.
I made this sketch on white paper with caracole pencils, using directly the correct reverse colour black for white, blue for the meteor, light blue for Betelgeuse and M42, and yellow for Rigel. The final work is to invert the scanned sketch.
Michel Deconinck
Object Type: meteor
Location: Itajobi, SP, Brazil
21º10′ S
49º03′ W
+453m
Date: 08/07/2011
Time: 12h10 (U.T.)
Instrument: none (naked eye)
Media: 2B 0.5mm graphite pencil on white paper
Observer: Rodrigo Pasiani Costa
That night in July I was observing some deep sky objects through my 180mm reflector in my mother’s farm, about 3 miles from town (a small one, I should say). There was no light pollution or any light around, so that was a great place to set a scope. The sugar canes were still low so they wouldn’t be a hassle. The zenith naked eye limit magnitude was around 5.5, and the seeing was also great, ranging from one to two (Antoniadi). It was all perfect, but the wind started to blow tough, rising a lot of dust from the ground in a way I was forced to cover the telescope. It was still early, about 9 p.m. local time, and I was decided not to leave the farm yet, since I had arrived there only one hour and a half before. So I decided to pick up my binoculars, a 10×50, to glance at some objects in Scorpius. When I was walking toward the car, where the binoculars were in, I lifted my eyes and saw the brighest bolide I’ve ever seen. It lasted at least three seconds, and crossed more than 40 degrees in the dark sky, close to Centaurus and Crux. It was green, and exploded beautifully right before fading. I could not believe in such astonishing meteor, and stood still, glaring the sky for a brief moment, with the image in my mind. Then I sketched it before I forgot some precious detail, as you can see above. I hope you enjoy it, it was amazing.
Thanks for the opportunity to immortalize this moment.
Clear sky to everyone, Rodrigo.
Object : Meteor Shower from 3200 Phaeton(Geminids)
Date : December 13/14 2010
Time : 03:15-04:15 LST / 10:15-11:15 UT
Location : Wickenburg, Arizona USA
Medium : Charcoal pencils, white paper, paintbrush used as stump, Windows Paint for inversion, polishing and removing unwanted artifacts
Detector : Visual observation
Magnitude : Varying from 5 to -2
Weather : Moonless sky, Wispy cirrus clouds that soon dissipated, calm winds,somewhat chilly in the mid 40’s
Comments :
The Geminids for this season didn’t dissapoint ! As you can see, in my opinion, it surpassed the Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR) from that of this past August’s Perseids. In this one hour time frame sketch, I jotted down over 80 blazing streaks of the falling particles. Obviously, this didn’t include those that fell behind me or the ones that went unnoticed. It easily matched the confirmed rate of 120 (ZHR) or even more !!
In the sketch, I tried to cover a vast area of sky to show not only the radiant and its host constellation but also where the ‘shooting stars’ will be falling. In most cases they appear to fall a good distance away from the radiant. I chose the area with Canis Major,Orion,Taurus, Auriga, M44, M45 and high above is of course Gemini. While most of the meteors burned brightly white/yellow-or so they appeared, there was one that I caught high over my head with a yellow/green color! This meteor had a ‘double streak’ !!
I could distinctly see two greenish trails with a gap in between as it vaporized across the sky. A rather peculiar sight to witness, perhaps some of you out there have seen them too.
Well, it sure was worthed watching this shower all the way into the dawn hours and leaving me a happy camper. 😉
Wishing you dark and clear skies,
Juanchin
