Graphite Pencil – Page 171 – Astronomy Sketch of the Day

Little Man Big

The Homunculus Nebula is one of my personal favorites when it comes to southern
hemisphere deep sky objects. I was favored with good seeing conditions one evening
and attempted a sketch using a soft lead pencil.

The Homunculus (Latin for “little man”) surrounds the notoriously variable star Eta
Carinae. Using a 4mm Plossl with a twelve inch f/10 Schmidt-Cassegrain (~760X), this
peculiar reflection nebula resembled a pale yellow bipolar planetary nebula. At
times, I thought the bipolar lobes appeared as a weak reddish color but I could
never hold the sight long enough to be certain. The disc was quite irregular in
shape and displayed much subtle detail. Eta Carinae was also of a subtle yellowish
tint. Indeed, Eta is included in the list of “red” stars compiled by George Chambers
back in the late 19th century.

The ASOD drawing was copied from the original sketch using Photoshop. The airbrush,
blurring and dodging tools were used.

Dave Riddle
Smyrna, Georgia USA

Superb celestial Sombrero

Messier 104 was described by Charles Messier as a “faint nebula” In 1784.
Now Messier 104 is known as a Sa-Sb spiral galaxy. It has a Very bright core
which was a major feature in my sketch. I noticed the dust lane cutting
through the galaxy but the side of the galaxy opposite the core is much fainter
than the rest. It was hard to see in my 16″ F/4.5 Dobsonian at 110X.

~Sal Grasso

Cosmic dust devil

I recently located a pencil drawing of Comet Hale-Bopp in one of old observing
notebooks and decided to reinterpret my hasty sketch using the Photoshop airbrush.

The drawing was made using Tim Puckett’s 24″ reflector with a 55mm Plossl (~90x)
while the comet was drawing close to the horizon. Despite the comet’s low elevation,
I noted a dust tail about five degrees long and a four degree ion tail. The
pseudo-nucleus was almost as bright as Alpha Aurigae (Capella)!

The coma displayed three prominent hoods. The innermost hood appeared to an
astonishing “geyser” jetting from and curving around the nucleus . I can only hope
that the drawing comes close to capturing this amazing feature (I almost named the
sketch “A Bad Drawing of a Great Comet”).

The original drawing was made on the evening of March 29th, 1997.

Dave Riddle
Smyrna, Georgia USA

Sparkling Lagoon

14th June, 2007., around 21:00 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

Eight views of the Great Opposition of 2003

This series of sketches covers my observations of Mars around the opposition
of 2003. Various telescopes were used including a 105mm Astro-Physics apo, a
200mm TEC Fluorite apo, a 13-inch Merz Refractor (circa. 1859, Herstmonceux,
Sussex, England) and a 28-inch Grubb Photo-visual Refractor (circa. 1893,
Royal Observatory, Greenwich, England). Simple graphite sketches with colour
notes were carried out at the eyepiece, generally over a 30 minute to one
hour period, these coloured pencil sketches then being drawn as soon as
possible afterwards. Interestingly the same sort of view is distilled out of
each observation regardless of the aperture being used!

Though the view didn’t appear to change very much from one evening to
another, the shrinking southern polar cap and changing phase of Mars is
distinctly seen over the three month observing period. My personal challenge
for the current Mars apparition is to catch the gibbous phase BEFORE
December 2007 opposition as well as afterwards.

The disc diameter of the sketches (image flipped to the correct orientation)
is approx. 5cm, and south is up.

Sally Russell

Cat’s Eye in a dracon’s hand

Cat’s Eye Nebula

One of the better known bright summer planetary nebulas in the constellation of Draco is NGC 6543. This blue-green planetary appears to be about one third of a minute of arc across, although its “outer corona” brings it out to about six arc minutes. The brightest part of this “outer corona” is IC 4677. None of this outer region can be seen from my urban site. The glow around the dying, hot, type O central star (or perhaps close binary pair) appears homogenous. None of the curlicue compressed gas loops were visible that can be seen in photographs. Some darkness was seen around the tenth magnitude central star. At a visual magnitude of 8.1 and at a distance of somewhere between 3300-3600 light years, this thousand year old planetary nebula looks great in telescopes much smaller than 18 inches.

Sketching:

Date and Time: 6-17-2007, 518-5:50 UT
Scope: 18” f/5 Dobson Ian. 12mm, 9mm eyepieces 191x, 254x
8”x12” white sketching paper, B, 2B graphite pencils, light brown colored pencil for nebula, scanned and inverted, contrast mean value adjustment using Imageenhance, star magnitude adjustments using Paint
Seeing: Pickering 7/10
Transparency: poor 2/5
Nelm: 3.9

Frank McCabe

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

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

Vedran Vrhovac

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.