Astronomy Sketch of the Day – Page 285 – Drawings and sketches of an astronomical nature

With family in tow

Saturn & family

When I pointed my scope at Saturn at the evening of the first May 2007 I was kindly
surprised to see 5 of the Saturnian moons all on one side of the planet!
From left to right and with their magnitude: Titan(M8.4), Iapetus (M10.6), Rhea
(M9.8), Dione (M10.5) & Thetys (M10.3).

For sketches of planets I mostly use Orthoscopic’s, for this one I used the 4mm wich
gave me 250x power.

The sketch was done on standard A4 printerpaper with a template of Saturn printed on
it. I then scanned it and added a grey background and the 5 moons in Microsoft
Paint.

Sketched on the 1st May 2007 from my home in Bornem, Belgium. I used my 8” f/5 dob
at 250x through a 4mm University Optics Ortho eyepiece.

Kris Smet

Namibia Globular

Globular clusters display distinct “personalities” to an attentive observer. Some
appear as pale, starless discs in large aperture telescopes while others, like Omega
Centauri, begin to resolve in small refractors. Less frequently, they will display
subtle color. My sketch of NGC 6388 in Scorpius is an example of this. Using the
Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge 12″ Schmidt-Cassegrain with a 31mm Nagler (~100x), the
globular’s star-like core appeared to be weakly yellow. The tint disappeared at
higher magnification (250X/12mm Nagler).

The original drawing was done at the eyepiece using a soft lead pencil. I prepared a
copy based on this drawing and my field notes. First, a “smudge” of graphite was
dotted with acrylic ink. A garden variety Bic pen with blue ink formed the core —
and when color inverted — captured my visual impression of the yellow color fairly
closely. The nucleus was then enhanced with Photoshop and the entire drawing blurred
to simulate the rather poor resolution caused by the seeing conditions.

Dave Riddle
Smyrna, Georgia USA

Terrific Trifid

Emission Nebula M20

14th June, 2007., around 21:30 UT
Petrova gora, Croatia

Last night I had another opportunity to observe. But this time, we went
to the Petrova gora, mountain maybe 1000 ft high, about 40 miles South
from the Zagreb and 20 miles South-East from the Karlovac (pop: 60 000).
Light pollution is still evident on northern horizon but to the South,
skies are beautiful. NELM near zenith was 6.10, not much difference from
the best night in my backyard (NELM 5.80) but big difference is that
there is no glare from street lamps and glow from nearby populated
places so sky is much darker. Watching MW composed from many clouds,
with few bright spots (M24, M8, M25), seeing M7 by naked eye is
wonderful feeling. Statement that there is no substitute for dark skies
hold very well. Of course, I used this opportunity to make more
sketches. I hope you will like results.

My process of creating sketches goes like this:
First, I observe and draw field sketch, full of notes, corrections and
other helpful stuff. After returning to house, I redraw all sketches to
include missing details, remove errors and to get better contrast under
white light. Next step is scanning of sketches. Afters scanning, I do
further adjustments of contrast in the Photoshop and add circle
representing that represents FOV. Last thing is description and saving
sketch in .tff and .jpg format.

I’m sketching on plain A4 paper with graphite pencils of different
hardness.

Vedran Vrhovac

Two great philosophers meet on the Moon

Aristoteles and Eudoxus

Warm moist air from the south and cool dryer air from the north have been battling it out over the Chicago area for the last week. This morning the cold air was winning as the thermometer in my yard was reading 47°F. Fortunately the cold high pressure air mass was accompanied by better than average seeing and transparency.

The 20 day old waning gibbous moon was about 30° above the southern horizon at an hour and a half before sunrise. For sketching targets I chose Aristoteles and Eudoxus along the northern terminator. The view in my 10” f/5.7 Newtonian held up well at both 241X and 362X. I sketched at the eyepiece using both magnifications. Twin peaks on the floor of Aristotles were visible with the southeastern most peak surrounded by shadow. This 90 km Eratosthenian crater was displaying nicely terraced wall on the steep eastern side. Off to the terminator side (east) and overlapped by Aristoteles is the shadowed floor crater Mitchell (31 km.) an older Imbrian formation. Further north along the terminator margin is rim illuminated crater Galle which stretches 22 km in diameter and is about the same age as Aristoteles. The other large and younger crater to the south is Eudoxus (70 km.) which also has steep terraced walls. A small part of the Caucasus mountain range can be seen west and southwest of Eudoxus. Due west of Aristoteles the ancient eroded ghost-like crater Egede at 37 km in diameter can be seen in contrast to the younger craters named above.

Sketching:
For this sketch I used: black Strathmore 400 Artagain paper, white and black Conte’ pastel pencils and a blending stump. Brightness was slightly decreased after scanning.
Telescope: 10 inch f/ 5.7 Dobsonian and 6 and 4 mm eyepiece 241 and      362X
Date: 6-6-2007 9:05-10:00 UT
Temperature: 8° C (47° F)
Clear, calm
Seeing: Antoniadi II-III
Colongitude: 158.7 °
Lunation: 20.6 days
Illumination: 72.7 %

Frank McCabe

Kemble’s Cascade

Here is an observation with a low power scope at x14 (made on 2/15/07 around 21.45
UT). The fov is 3.8°. The small ETX is great for rich field views. The object is
easy to find with a pair of bino’s when going straight up from Algol to Mirphak and
continuing for about 9 degrees. The cluster at the end of the cascade did not reveal
much detail with this power, but I only wanted to give a general impression of the
scene. High clouds were interfering my site, and with my limiting magnitude.

The raw sketch was made at the EP with a HB mechanical pencil. The final sketch was
digitally rendered in Photopaint (thus eliminating the tedious scanning procedure).
North is up, matching a binocular orientation.

Rony De Laet

http://www.geocities.com/rodelaet, my personal website.

Grand gathering of ancients

Although the light pollution from my residence severely limits deep sky observing;
I took advantage of unusually transparent seeing conditions to observe some bright
galaxies, globular clusters and planetary nebula. My favorite globular cluster
targets are M-5, M-92 and M-15. On this evening M-5 was well positioned for
observing just after dark. The appeal of M-5 for me is the bright glowing egg
shaped core with arching sprinkles of stars curving out from the center. As you
move out from the core the star density gradually drops off creating a very
pleasing view.

M-5 glows at magnitude 5.6 and is located about 20 minutes of arc north and west
from 5 Serpentis. This globular is approximately 13 billion years old at a
distance of 24,500 ly from us. The distance across this great ball of tens of
thousands of stars is about 165 ly.

Sketch:
Date and Time: 6-9-2007, 315-3:45 UT
Scope: 18” f/5 Dobsonian. 12mm eyepiece 167X
8”x12” white sketching paper, 4B soft charcoal pencil,
blending stump, scanned and inverted
Seeing: Pickering 8/10
Transparency: Excellent 4/5
Nelm: 4.8

Frank McCabe
Oak Forest, Il.

A work in progress

The Orion nebula may be one of the most challenging objects in the sky to observe.
The amount of subtle detail it displays is astonishing and it is perhaps one of the
most difficult nebula to sketch.

Edward Holden’s monograph on the central area of M42 (Central Parts of the Nebula of
Orion, Washington Astronomical Observations for 1878, Appendix I) inspired me to
attempt to follow the footsteps of great visual observers of the the past — the
Herschels, Lassell, Rosse, Bond, etc.– and try to capture the wealth of details
seen in my 18″ reflector. I might add that my sketch is a composite drawing made
with apertures ranging from 70mm to a 20″ reflector. A separate drawing was made on
each evening of observing and combined into a single rendering. The Dearborn
Observatory star maps (claimed to go down to the 18th magnitude) were used to insure
the proper “placing” of the details noted with the various telescopes. The
(unfinished) drawing is still a work in progress after two years of observing.
Magnifications on my 18″ reflector ranged from ~60X (40 mm Pentax) to ~460X (5mm
Radian). The lowest power used: 12X with my Pronto 70mm refractor!

I settled on using a graphite pencil after experimenting with charcoal and soft
lead pencils. Nothing fancy here — just graphite on regular (economy) typing
paper from Office Depot. The drawing was color-inverted using my HP scanner and
tinted with the Paint program.

An extended observing session revealed details I hadn’t noticed before. The
remarkable D’Arrest “comets” were visible only when the transparency was good. The
prominent dark “globule” W1 was seen so well through a 24″ reflector one evening
that my first impression was that there was a bit of dirt on the field lens of my
eyepiece!

I hope that in another two years I can finish the drawing.

Dave Riddle

The “Seeing Beater” versus the Jovial Giant

For observers in the northern hemisphere this opposition of Jupiter is not
a good one. This complex and fascinating gaseous world won’t manage
to rise above above the troubled horizon so views are going to be compromised during most if not all observations we attempt.

Having said this, Jupiter offers much to the observer seeking detail, OK it’s not
as sharp or as plentiful as we are used to during higher oppositions but it is
still worth recording with our sketch pads.

Increasingly I have been using my long focal length F15 Antares 105mm Achromatic
refractor for sketching observations, leaving the larger Newtonian for those rarer
steady nights. The long refractor is proving to be a bit of a “Seeing Beater”.

On the evening of June 1st/2nd 2007 I made such and observation and sketch and
hope you will agree it was worth the effort with some nice detail in the belts
evident and a couple of fine ovals too.

Start 00.00 end 00.15…. 2/6/07
Antares 105mm F15 refractor working at 163x with a Denk binoviewer, enhanced star
diagonal. Sketch made onto white paper with pre-drawn circles and black surround
using Derwent watercolour and pastel pencils. Image scanned but not enhanced.

Dale Holt

One prom times twelve

The flare activity this morning (June 9th, 2007) had pretty much subsided by the time my session took place. Yes, I was disappointed, but AR0960 was still showy
with AR0959 accessorizing it nicely. There was a thin little plage
marking 959 as well as plage just East of the center of the disk, and
plage also very thinly following the path of a long slender filament just
inside the Eastern limb. Add the remarkable plage details in AR0960 to
that, and you have a straight line of interrupted plage going from East to
West.

The two spots within 960 were easy to spot as black dots. There was a
third dot just North of them that I first thought was another spot to that
region. But I’m pretty sure it was a little piece of filament having
compared my sketches to other images afterward.

When tuning, I could easily pick out several other filaments across the
disk even though they were very slender and short, almost like little
crooked crosshairs of an eyepiece. There were five definite prominences
with a few little hints of others on the limb. The huge prominence that
was evident on the NW limb earlier this morning was no longer there that I
could see. However, the “pick of my pleasure” prominence was the presence
of an “m” shaped faint one on the NE limb. And this, my friends, became
the start of a three and a half hour project for me today. It made no
matter that I had lots of chores to do. Astronomy comes first…at least
today.

The series for this one prom was rendered in two sessions. An hour with 1
minute intervals, an hour and a half break so that I could at least get
the riding mower part of the grass cutting done, and then another hour
session with 10 minute intervals again. I would have loved to spend the
entire day doing this, but I was starting to get sunburn on my farmer’s
tan legs and feet that today sported sandals instead of sneakers.
Nevertheless, perhaps 12 sketches of the same prominence were enough to
show how dynamic the Sun is over such a short period of time. Or could I
have really stopped because I didn’t want to be known as the eccentric
prom lady that latched on to only one prom, sketching it over and over
again with a strange fixation…you can chose, if you like.

Sketches were done with black Strathmore paper and colored Conte’ crayons
for the full disk, white Conte’ for the prominence sequence.

Erika Rix
Zanesville, Ohio

This is a delightful video version of full disk and the prom sequence sketches that Erika created: http://www.photoshow.com/watch/gA4ky6wN check it out!

Gibbous Goddess

If you live in the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere, you’ve probably
noticed brilliant Venus high in the west at twilight–indeed, it’s hard to miss.
Apart from the phase, little detail is normally visible in the cloudtops of Venus,
due to the glare and low altitude of our “sister planet”.

This year presents the observer with a very favorable apparition because Venus
reaches greatest eastern elongation near the spring equinox. If an observer uses
filters and gets out during early twilight (or even before sunset) while the planet
is still above the atmospheric murk on the horizon, subtle detail can be seen on
Venus.

Even though it is our closest neighbor (next to the Luna) and has been visited by
spacecraft, there is still much that is unknown about Venus. Iti s a worthy target
for any observer, especially during a favorable apparition.

This sketch was made using a 2B and HB graphite pencil, black ink, and a loaded
stump. The sketch was done from an eyepiece diagram based on an intensity scale
where 0.0 = darkest and 10.0 = brightest.

Michael Rosolina
Friars Hill, WV USA