Sketching

Over the years of observing, I have often taken the opportunity to sketch the object that I am observing. One of the things that sketching does is it makes you slow down and spend time to search out the details of the object. Sketching also gives you a visual record that goes beyond your notes, and if you can operate a scanner it allows you to share your eyepiece experience.

Recently, I finally figured out how to operate my scanner on my multi-use printer. So, I scanned in a few sketches that I made at last year's Eldorado Star Party  and then did some adjustments with Photoshop. The sketches are done with graphite pencils on a white sketching paper. The scanned images were cropped, adjusted for brightness and contrast and then inverted so it would turn it into a white on black background. I also touched up the individual stars a bit to make them look a bit more round.

So below are a few examples of some of my sketches I did at last year's Eldorado Star party. 

NGC 1035, 1042 and 1052 are a trio of galaxies in Cetus. This is a nice tight grouping that fits into the field of view of my 16mm eyepiece (46 arc min). NGC 1042 is face on spiral and very soft visually. 1052 is an edge on spiral with the hint of a visible core. 1035 is another edge on galaxy but with even brightness along its length.

NGC908 is a SABc spiral galaxy in Cetus.  The spiral is at an intermediate angle. The core is visible and is approximately 3 arc min long.

NGC 253 is known as the Sculptor Galaxy. It is relatively bright at 7.9 mag.  This is another spiral SABc galaxy which is viewed nearly edge on. The core is very visible and well defined.  Charles Messier missed this object and its discovery in 1783 is credited to Caroline Herschel, sister of famous deep sky observer William Herschel. 

So the ability to digitize my sketches and share them has increased my interest in this aspect of the hobby. Going forward my plan will be to do more sketches. More to come....

Clear skies;

rw