Saturn – May 9, 2014 (above) and April 30, 2014 (below)
Desire to see the more deep ancient lunar horizon landscapes lead me to build more larger instruments,
since last autmn,s first light I have 10 nights observations with my homemade 13″ refractor [lens from China 320/3700] which has a comfortable fixed focuser in equartorial mount.
With a glass 5 times more heavier than 8″ lens this 13″ shows far majesic views of the moon and planets than the superb 8″…… and but at least on the moon limbs , the details seems to equal…. yet.
Yesterday, on a good seeing night , I could see a great view of the saturn that I have never seen yet. —————-
The H-alpha Sun – May 9, 2014Non inverted colors on white paper.Inverted
Aloha!
I was enjoying the Sun this morning and trying to decide how to represent the most prominent features. Sketching the Sun has just not gotten me the feeling that I can really represent it as well as I would like to as far as colorizing goes. I like using black paper but it isn’t smooth enough whereas plain white paper is. But when I have tried to add color later, it just loses what I see in the scope.
So today I tried a little something different. I like how some inverted blue colors really become the right colors for the Sun. So I put some oil pastel colors to paper & inverted to see what I could use. The nice thing about the oil pastel is I can scratch off small little lines to try to get the details of the solar surface. I had to think in negative to produce the sketch in order to preserve black, white and the different tones of red. This is my 1st attempt using this technique and I am not entirely happy with it but it is a bit of an experiment.
H-alpha Sun
5/9/14
60mm Lunt 88x
Oil Pastel, white permanent pen, white paper, Lyra polycolor pencils, a needle to scratch off the oil pastels to produce dark lines
Inverted with Photoscape software
I send the pencil-thin galaxy N.G.C. 4565.
It is a very interesting object on the northern sky!
I have more info on my sketch.
I used color-crayons (waterbased) on black paper.
Loc. : Trondheim, Norway.
I’m very sorry that you haven’t had too much from me of late, it certainly isn’t due to the fact that I have lost interest 😉
Anyhow, prompted as I often am by Owen’s superb selection of galaxy of the month here is my b&w inversion of my original sketch of NGC 5529 a beauty from Bootes, drawn using pencil and blending stumps on cartridge paper of the image delivered in psudeo real time by my 20″ F3.7 mirror and cooled Watec 120n+ deep sky video camera onto a b&w CRT monitor. 🙂
I hope you like it and I hope that you get a chance to enjoy it yourselves.
The Jewel Box star cluster (NGC 4755) and the Coal Sack dark nebula
Hello all,
A couple of weekends ago saw Ice In Space Astro Camp ’14 happen at Lostock in rural NSW, Australia. I arrived late on the Friday, and when I finally settled at the camp it was dark and I just didn’t feel like setting up a big scope. The sky was clear, the full brilliance of the Milky Way was arcing overhead, so it was a great chance for some wide field sketching with my little 4″ achro.
Some time ago I had made a mental note of a potential sketching target as being the area around the lovely cluster The Jewel Box in the Southern Cross. The great thing about this scope and eyepiece combination is the true field of view encompasses the Jewel Box, Mimosa or Beta Cruxius, and the western edge of the dark nebula The Coal Sack, all set off against the mottled background Milky Way. Gorgeous stuff!
The Coal Sack is also surprisingly detailed. Streamers of darker lines, patches of brighter, and ghostly arcs. These details made for a great challenge as they are, well, black… Another fainter open cluster can also be seen just to the upper right of the Jewel Box. The Southern Cross contains dozens of open clusters within its boarder.
This sketch is very close to showing the full 5deg True Field of View I had.
Object: Jewel Box and the Coal Sack.
Scope: 4″ f/5 achromatic refractor
Gear: 30mm 82deg Explore Scientific, 17X, 5deg TFOV.
Location: Lostock, NSW, Oz
Date: 25th April, 2014
Media: White soft pastel, charcoal and white ink on A4 size black paper.
Duration: approx. 2hrs
The Sun – May 4, 2014My place for looking at the sun
Since I exchanged Belgium for Sweden last year, I am faced with lack of astronomical darkness since mid april. Astronomical darkness (sun below 18 degrees of horizon) will only return end of august. Therefore I will be concentrating drawing more suns and moons instead of deepsky. The positive side to this is that in Winter time it ‘s astronomical dark at 5.30PM already 🙂
I have used my 21 years old TeleVue 101 SDF apochromate refractor, teamed with an (also old) Daystar 0.7Ã… h-alfa filter. A Barlow is needed to reach the required f/30 focal length. I am using a TeleVue alt-az Gibraltar mount.
I have added a picture to show the observation location. I have reached SQM 21.6 a number of times already.
Hope you like it.
Object Name Plato
Object Type Crater
Location Madrid ( city sky), Spain
Date April 8th, 2014
Media Graphite pencils
Telescope: Maksutoc 150/1500mm
Eyepiece: LV 5mm. i.e 300 x
Object Name : C/2013 R1 (LOVEJOY)
Object Type : comet
Location : Laprade lake (Aude), south-west France
Date : December 04 2013 4h45 TU
Media : graphite pencil, white paper + PhotoPaint
Comments :
The LOVEJOY coma is bright and light green colour. A darker ring surrounds the shiny nucleus.
The tail is wide and about 10° long. It is rather white.
I saw it easily with binocular 10×50 on the left of Boots constellation.
Condition : A very good and dark night, no moon, no wind, pretty good seeing.
I could report mag 7 to 12 starfield.
No significative named star in the field.
Equipment : 300mm Dobson Telescope + 24mm Ultra Wide Angle eyepiece (mag X64 FOV 1.3°)
Sketch was made with pencil on white paper while observing the comet before sunrise (-2°C)
A bit of image processing was used to invert the image and give it some colour.
Mars – April 29, 2014Mars feature location and nomenclature chart – April 29, 2014
I made an observation of Mars on April 29, 2014 (03:30 U.T. or 11:30 PM EDT) using a 9-inch (23-cm) F/13.5 Maksutov-Cassegrain at 258x and 310x. Syrtis Major was prominent preceding the central Meridian (CM) with a cloud noted over its midsection flowing towards the East and into Libya (extending from an Equatorial Cloud Band (ECB) extending from from the following limb). The Hellas basin was noted to be very bright south of Syrtis Major towards the southern limb. Sinus Sabaeus was visible as a dark extension from the CM towards the South-following limb. The North Polar Cap (NPC) appeared small and brilliant. The NPC was surrounded by a dark collar. Dark to dusky maria was noted over the northern hemisphere of Mars. I have included an image that is labeled with the nomenclature of the majority of albedo features noted.I hope that you all like it.
