Pastels – Page 18 – Astronomy Sketch of the Day

Thank You, Summer Twilight!

* Object Name: Moon
* Object Type: Moon
* Location: Deventer, The Netherlands
* Date: June 27, 2010
* Media: White pastel pencil on black paper

Sketching the Moon with pastel is becoming the most satisfying part of the hobby for me. Especially during midsummer, when the nights aren’t dark from my home so deep-sky isn’t even an option. During winter I hated the Moon for ruining my deep-sky views in those rare clear nights, but this summer I discovered that the Moon is one of the rewarding targets to view and to sketch. Thank you, summer twillight!

This is the sketch I made last night. It was the lowest full moon of 2010 and it hovered beautifully above the neighbours roof, about 15 degrees high. I took my little refractor (60mm f/6,9) again, put it on the desk in my hobby room and started to draw the Moon with a white pastel pencil on black A3-paper. I used a very basic K18mm eyepiece. The disk of the Moon is 8″ in diameter. The sketch took 2 hours to complete.

Kind regards,

Roel Weijenberg
www.roelblog.nl

Eudoxus and Aristoteles from Either Side of the Pond

Eudoxus and Aristoteles
By Dale Holt and Frank McCabe

During my morning and Dale’s afternoon we were communicating back and forth by e-mail about sketching during our respective evenings. We realized at some point that we could possibly sketch the same lunar target albeit at slightly different times. We selected two dominant craters near the terminator, namely Eudoxus and Aristoteles.
Dale began sketching first with the moon in his western sky and with very little time he did a remarkable job in only 40 minutes using a 6 inch Apo refractor.
When Dale had finished his sketch and completed another of planet Saturn that is when I got started.
I was using a 10 inch dob and much higher magnification. I rotated my sketch 180° so north would be up as in Dale’s sketch. I should also add I spent more than 3 times as long sketching so I naturally captured more of the two craters whereas Dale got the wide view including the environs of Mare Frigoris.
Aristoteles is 87 km in diameter and a large Eratostherian era crater with just some minor central peaks and steep walls. Note the shadow changes on the floor because of the time interval between these sketches. Eudoxus is slightly smaller (70 km.) and younger as a Copernican era impactor and has steeper walls with shadow changes on the floor that are a little less evident.
That was fun let’s do that again soon when we both have equal time.

The evenings of May 19th 2010
The moon just a little under (UK) and a little over (USA) 6 days into lunation

Warmest regards from both of us
Dale Holt and Frank McCabe

Locations: Chippingdale Observatory, NE Hertfordshire, UK and Oak Forest, Illinois USA

The Moon and Venus in Front of My Home

Subject: Crescent Moon and Venus in front of my home

Hi Artists,all o.k.?O.k. for me at moment.This spring is very strange,in this moment cold and clouds and rain….i’m without words.
I sent my last sketch of great vision:Crescent Moon and Venus at sunset,made with my little bino 10×50 on trypod.
I am return from work and i see that beautyfull vision on clear blu sky.The seeing was perfect,very clear and on terrace of my room i mounted my trypod and my bino.
i made very quyckly this sketch and i stay ubeliever about the shadow of Moon,i don’t see one like that! Very clear,i can see the clear and the dark zones….incredible!
Under the Moon you can see the top of cypress of the hill folded by the wind.
At next and clear sky….i hope!
Ciao,Giorgio.

Site:Pergola,Marche Region,Center Italy.
Date:14 June 2010 10 p.m. Local time.
Instrument:Bino 10×50 on trypod
Seeing:Excelent
Technics:White pastel and pen on azure paper.

Timocharis

Timocharis Crater
Erika Rix

2010 06 21, 0300 UT
Timocharis
PCW Memorial Observatory, OH, USA
Erika Rix
Zhumell 16”, 8mm TV Plossl, 225 x

Phase: 64.8
Lunation: 8.66. d
Illumination: 71.3%
Lib. Lat: 7°30’
Lib. Long: 4°47’
Az: 215°14’, Alt: 27°21’

This complex crater has a crushed central relief and the area was completely enveloped with shadow. I could make out some of the western terraced walls within the crater. Heinrich (9.5 km), B (5 km) and C (4 km), were very clear as well as a small portion of the wrinkle ridge to the southeast. Timocharis was formed ~ 3.2 to 1.1 billion years ago during the Erathosthenian period. Height is estimated to be 3110 meters. Faint small rays can be spotted with decent seeing conditions.

Sketched scopeside on black Strathmore Artagain paper, charcoal, black wax pencil, white Conte’ crayon and pencils.

Pastel Moon

Full Moon
By Krzysztof Pieszczoch

I was waiting on this full Moon. It was my first experience with pastel crayon. I like sketching through the binocular 🙂

Object name: Moon
Object type: Moon
Location: Tarnów , Poland
Date: 27 May 2010 r.
Time: 21:30 UT
Artist: Krzysztof Pieszczoch (Astrokrzychu)
Equipment used: Binocular 16X50 (2″) FOV 4,25 deg. and 7X50 FOV 7,5 deg.
– white pastel and black paper

Weather conditions:
– warm evening
– beautiful clear sky

Yours sincerely,
Krzysztof Pieszczoch

A Moon with a View

Saturn – Large Sketch from Observation Through the Telescope With Artists Conception Below
By Mark Seibold

From Sandy Oregon, 30 miles east of Portland, at the home driveway – Saturn Observed February 28 ~ March 2 Through 10.1″ Newtonian- Large Pastel Sketch produced:

I observed Saturn through my 10.1″ Newtonian at medium to high power magnification (120X ~ 240X) on several evenings last week, in effort to see some detail in the rings and surface cloud banding. Seeing was medium to marginal at times through the evenings. Using Sol Robbins template and other images from the web to accurately proportion the rings, I rendered this 19” X 25” pastel impression showing about what is seen in a good medium telescope if one stands back say 25 feet from the full image on a standard computer screen. Saturn’s disc was sketched at 7 ¾” at the equator. The Cassini division was easily visible and the crepe ring only hinted at high magnification at 240x through a 5mm Super Plossl eyepiece through my 10.1″ f/4.5 Newtonian-Dobsonian telescope with average seeing conditions at times with glimpses through steady atmosphere.

The foreground was quickly added from imagination for depth and drama as a final touch, which seems to captivate a view from one of Saturn’s moons, possibly Titan with a suggestion to an ocean-scape.

The sketch was photographed with a Sigma 35mm DSLR under white balanced studio lights.

Whole Moon in Pastel

Moon
By Roel Weijenberg

* Object Name: Moon
* Object Type: Moon
* Location: Deventer, The Netherlands
* Date: May 25, 2010
* Media: White pastel pencil on black paper

Yesterday the Moon was very low in the sky (maximum altitude 20 degrees) so I couldn’t see him from my backyard. So I took a very old 60mm f/6,9 refractor inside the house, placed it on a EQ-1 on top of my desk. At 32x the Moon was a nice bowl, almost full. I sketched it with a white pastel pencil on black paper. The disk on the paper was approx, 5″ in diameter. It took me about 30 minutes to complete this sketch. Next time I’ll probably use a larger disk to draw finer details, but this was my first try using white pastel on black paper so I’m pretty satisfied for now.

Kind regards,

Roel Weijenberg

NGC 4755 – The Jewel Box

NGC 4755
By Scott Mellish

NGC 4755 “The Jewel Box”
Open Cluster
Crux
18/03/10
Ilford NSW Australia
56cm f5 Dobsonian
Field: 27′
Magnification: 149x
Sky Quality Meter reading: 21:46

There was a bit of haze around while I was out observing, along with intermittent thin cloud so I decided to stick with something bright.

I have sketched NGC 4755 a number of times, but I have to say that a sketch can never do justice to this very beautiful object.

With this sketch I put in an extra effort to try and get as accurate a representation as I could.

The “Jewel Box” was discovered by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille when he was in the southern hemisphere during the years 1751-53

John Hershel was suitably impressed when he observed the cluster and wrote the following description-

“this cluster, though neither a large nor a rich one, is yet and extremely brilliant and beautiful object when viewed through an instrument of sufficient aperture to show distinctly the very different colour of its constituent stars, which give it the effect of a superb piece of fancy jewellery”

NGC 4755 contains some of the most luminous supergiant stars within the Milky Way ranging from around 83 000 to 75 000 times the brightness of the Sun. The central orange coloured star in the sketch is a massive red supergiant about equal to Betelguese.

One really has to look at this object through a telescope to really enjoy the visual treat of this exquisite open cluster.

Scott Mellish.

Jupiter Has Lost a Stripe

Jupiter – May 23, 2010
By Jef De Wit

Everybody knows that even in a small telescope you can see on Jupiter two brown belts. However when you turn your telescope on the planet now, you will see only one stripe!

The South Equatorial Belt (SEB), twice as wide as Earth and more than twenty times as long, is not actually gone, but may be just hiding underneath some higher white clouds. The last time this happened was in 1993.

When Jupiter is visible from my garden, the Sun is already high up in the sky. It took me 15 minutes to find the planet. Searching an object (except the Sun, the Moon and Venus) with a Dobson in broad daylight isn’t an easy job! Once in the eyepiece I could even see Jupiter easily in the finderscope (9×50).

Jupiter in daylight seems like a ghost. You have the impression to look through the planet. The North Equatorial Belt (NEB) was easy to see. But I was never so happy I couldn’t find something (this doesn’t happen fast in astronomy!). The SEB was nowhere. I guess the thin line is the northern border of the SEB.

Some details are not like actual photos of Jupiter. I saw the South Polar Region (SPR) brighter than the region just north of it. The north side of Jupiter looked as white as the Equatorial Zone (EZ), but in reality it is much darker.

Information: Science@NASA

Clear skies
Jef De Wit

Object Name: Jupiter
Object Type: planet
Location: Hove, Belgium (51°09’ north lat. 4°28’ east long.)
Date and time: 23 May 2010 7.00-7.30 UT
Equipment: Orion Optics UK 12” Dobson
Eyepiece: 7mm Nagler T6 (magnification 171x)
NELM: daylight
Planet information: diam. 36.7″, mag -2.2, alt. 37°
Medium: pastel pencils, cotton swap, blending stump, blue printing paper, scanned (with some adjustments), labels were added with Paint

H-Alpha Sun and Filaments – May 10, 2010

H-Alpha Sun and Filaments – May 10, 2010
By Erika Rix

2010 May 10, 1355 UT – 1610 UT
Solar h-alpha featuring filaments – Erika Rix
PCW Memorial Observatory, Zanesville, Ohio USA
DS 60mm Maxscope, LXD75, 21-7mm Zhumell

H-alpha sketch created scopeside with black Strathmore paper, white Conte’ crayon and pencil, white Prang watercolor pencil, Derwent charcoal pencil, black oil pencil.

T: 5°C-11°C, H: 45%
S: Wilson 3, T: 3.5/6
Clear/slightly hazy, light breeze
Alt: 40.3-62.8, Az: 101-139.7

Paul had a late night imaging so I brought the dogs outside with me, puppies included, to keep it quiet in the house for him. This, of course, meant lots of extra paws running around the observatory floor instead of just the steady snoring of Riser, my regular observing buddy. The views were shaking so badly that I finally gave up and tore down the rig, resetting it back up in the grass. I should have done that to begin with I suppose since seeing wasn’t the greatest and would have been a lot worse in the observatory, especially with the temps rising so quickly after our freeze last night.

There were quite a few features to concentrate on, but what really caught my eye were two areas of filaments in the NE quadrant. The transparency and seeing were just poor enough that I really struggled with pulling any detail out of the prominences on that section of the limb. I didn’t want to miss out trying to capture them as they reached inward across the disk, forming a beautiful display of soft looking filaments. Then even further inward reaching toward the center, the details were sharper with the next set of filaments.