Kemble’s Cascade & NGC 1502 – Camelopardalis

Kemble's Cascade and NGC 1502
Kemble’s Cascade and NGC 1502

Hi ASOD, sending this observation of this magnificent object. It was the first time I could see this object and had to make the sketch. is a large area with a number of very luminous stars that end up in the open cluster NGC 1502 with its easy double star Struve 485 detectable at low power. This object will be of my favorite deep sky objects, I hope you can watch it and enjoy it as much as I do.

regards.

Object name: Kemble’s Cascade & NGC 1502 Camelopardalis
Object type: Asterism & Open cluster
Location: Bonilla Cuenca ( spain )
Date: 7 October 2013
Hour: 00:00 < 00:45
Media: graphite pencil, processed and inverted gimp 2.8
Optical equipment: Refractor Tele Vue 101 F / 5,4 Genesis SDF Eye piece ES 30mm
Magnification 18x True field 4,5°

Sky conditions: Stable sky, light wind. Nelm 6,2 Temperature 10,2°C Relative humidity 57% Borthle scale 3/9

http://dibujodelcielonocturno.blogspot.com.es/

Plato and Archimedes on the Terminator

Plato and Archimedes Craters
Plato and Archimedes Craters

Plato and Archimedes lunar craters
Eastbourne, UK
29th August 2013, 01:15 – 03:15 UT. Temperature 13C; seeing Antoniadi III
Meade LX90 8″ Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with 26mm super Plossl eyepiece, 77x
White and black pastel on Daler Rowney Canford black paper

I was lucky enough that a second consecutive clear night allowed me to study these craters again; this time they were on the terminator and the whole scene looked very dramatic, enhanced by the long deep shadows.

Best regards and clear skies,

Oli Froom

Crater Hainzel

Crater Hainzel
Crater Hainzel

Hello friends of the dark side,

the mooncrater Hainzel was the object that I sketched yesterday evening. It was quite warm and nice weather to draw the picture.
The craters composes a complex formation with Hainzel A and C with identical size.
There are very steep slopes to the South.
High walls crushed to the North-East by Hainzel C and to the North by Hainzel A.
The floor is very tormented.

A clear sky and best Greetings

Uwe

Object Name Hainzel Crater
Object Type Lunar Crater
Location near Tauberbischofsheim Germany
Date 29. July. 2012 21.45 p.m till 22.30 p.m
Media graphite pencil and white Paper

Color Impressions of Nova Delphini 2013

Nova Delphini 2013
Nova Delphini 2013

As with some novae I have followed in the past I have been fascinated by the colours displayed as they develop. In particular one in Vulpecula (1960/70s) came to display an intense mauve/magenta hue (pink to some). If I recall right this was ascribed as it going through the “nebular phase”. More recently one in either Cygnus or Cassiopeia became the most intensely blue star I’ve ever seen!

While conceding the subjectivity of colour perception/judgement and so on (and differences with others’ monitors and such) a few details about these impressions……

Aug 15: Creamy Yellow. Aug 19: slightly more Yellow. Aug 26: Peach! Aug 30: Buttercup Yellow.

Early Sep. it started to display hues that I struggled to name but opted for Bronze/Coppery-Yellows.

Then it reddened markedly and even so could not quite equate it to the redness of carbon stars V Aql or of X Sge which was more near the nova’s brightness then.

The last (Oct 5) observation showed a more definite difference to X Sge: it was now fainter than X but looked slightly more toward red-violet.

David

[Our thanks to David for allowing us to repost this from the CloudyNights.com sketching forum. –Jeremy]

Orion’s belt stars

Orion's Belt
Orion’s Belt

Hello ASOD, here join my last watercolor

Object Name (Orion’s belt stars and M42)
Object Type (Constellation and nebulae)
Location (Porquerolles on board of Aquarellia)
Date (02-10-2013)
Media (watercolor on white paper, paint.net for inverting the sky)

In the night of October the first, our old two masts Aquarellia was anchoring close to the harbour of Porquerolles, one of the three “Provencal golden islands”.
At one o’clock in the night I wake me up,… maybe ‘cause of some wave noise? I was surprised by seeing the Orion’s belt stars and M42 rising close to the ‘Sainte Agathe’ fort. With my 7×50 binoculars I sketch this original encounter, the mythic Orion warrior at the rear of a real castle.
The French coast, here in my nord, is full of light pollution but to my surprise, the castle illumination was the only light in the sight. The island is not so close to the polluted coast, so the Orion’s constellation was pure in the dark while rising.
This watercolour was made on board with local salt water (;

I hope you enjoy

Michel Deconinck

http://astro.aquarellia.com/

Phantom Erupts

Messier 74
Messier 74

Object Name: M74 and SN2013ej
Object Type: galaxy and supernova
Location: Cherry Springs, Pennsylvania
Date: August 5, 2013
Media: graphite pencil, white paper, digitally inverted and scaled

Notes: 16″ Newtonian, 225x. Observed UT 2013-08-05 06:30-08:20. 10 deg. C, 75% humidity. Exceptional transparency, good seeing. Most of the night the transparency was variable, but it became exceptionally good (at least for summer) one hour before astronomical twilight. As M74 was then reaching respectable altitude, it erupted with detail. The very compact HII region Hodge 627 was seen intermittently within the star cloud at the end of the southern arm. Although the exaggerates this brightness difference, supernova 2013ej was indeed brighter than the surrounding Milky Way stars.

An Interesting Arp with Jet Power

Arp 161 (UGC6665)
Arp 161 (UGC6665)

I grabbed just one observation last night [sketch from April 30], I considered comet PanSTARRS as inspired by Andrew Robertson’s dramatic observational drawing from the previous night showing fan like anti tail!
But with it still out of pointing range of the main observatories scopes I found myself again working from the Arp atlas. I picked one out that was well placed in Virgo up against the Leo border, Arp 161 aka UGC6665 turned out to be a real challenge! It was not only the location that caught my eye, but the ‘emanating jet’ nature of this galaxy that excited me, yes another one after Arp 138 from the previous evening!
I got the galaxy easily with my usual star hoping to negate the goto inaccuracies. Initially the jet & plume were pretty obvious, but as frames refreshed and I tweaked the camera control box, for gain, exposure etc both jet and the even more elusive plume disappeared, monitor setting for brightness and contrast were also adjusted, these in combination with the video camera controls as you can imagine have an infinite combo of setting potentials. With practice over what must be 7-8 years now I have a pretty good knack of getting the best image before ‘marking the paper’.
However you can’t adjust out bad seeing, the analogue video camera has eyepiece realism with faint objects and stars coming and going at every ‘refresh’.
The jet and extended plume that I had almost nonchalantly expected to see and sketch leisurely were proving much tougher than I had anticipated. At the time of writing I have no idea of their comparative brightness. The conclusion was that I sat there for nearly an hour before I made my rendition on paper, for something that will look so simple to you, it was very difficult to capture, or rather to try to capture as it appeared. Features such as the couple of very faint stars close into the extended halo of the galaxy appearing only fleetingly and on most apparitions looked rather like a jet themselves, tricky.
Arp 161 complete with Jet & Plume
Anyhow here you have my sketch of what is when you consider it a mind blowing object seeding out into the vast universe. The excellent book ‘The Arp Atlas of peculiar galaxies, Kanipe & Webb’ states it has been seen, the jet and plume that is with a 20″ under what I can only assume are pristine sky conditions, another observation with a 25″ just describes the galaxy with no extensional activity, a challenge for my pals off to Tenerife to explore the deep heavens with Rod’s 25” on mount Teide perhaps?