[astro_south (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by omnivorr

Very appealing sketches Andrew! ..could you tells us a lil about the materials you've used.. what lighting, if any, on the sketchpad..

The sketches were done on normal sketch paper (A5 size - usually 3 to a page) using a HB lead pencil and a HB pacer pencil (for locating stars and faint stars). I have a little box with 3 LED lights that has two power levels that I hold in the hand that holds the sketch pad - usually this light is lying flat on the pad and illuminating enough of it to draw. The actual sketching starts with plotting out the bright stars and trying to keep everything relative (ie "gap between those stars is two thirds of the distance between those other stars, therefore plonk a dot there"). If it is a galaxy I will usually also plot the core at this stage. Then it is just a matter of filling in the nebula and fainter stars which involves a lot of glancing between the eyepiece and the sketch pad. I use the side of the pencil to get some material on the page in the general area of nebula, and then I use my finger to smudge / smooth out the pencil to replicate the view through the eyepiece.

These sketches show the detail I noticed through the eyepiece, but another person may not be able to see the detail as readily. I also draw the details seen through averted vision and any other 'seeing' tricks such as bumping the scope. As there is no tracking on my scope, I am constantly bumping and moving the scope to re-align the object to the edge of the field and then let it drift across the field of view which helps me to notice the detail. As it drifts across I try and identify two of three bits of detail at the eyepiece to add to the drawing before I go back to the sketch pad.

When I get home I erase the stars in the wrong position (designated by a cross I put through them) and any erroneous pencil marks that make it onto the page from juggling two pencils, the light and the sketch pad. I then scan the image, and take the scan into Irfanview where I crop the individual objects from the original page and then apply a negative change to the image to make the pencil marks white and the background black. I usually have to resize the image as the scanned image is too big (in this case I resized the longest dimension on the cropped image to 800 pixels) then saved the image.

Originally Posted by h0ughy

great drawings Andrew - haven't seenyou do them for some time!!

haven't been out for a while mate I think last Sept / Oct was my previous trip out there and since then it has only been short trips out to the Lockyer Valley where I am more focused on observing than sketching due to the shorter time available.

Originally Posted by §AB

excellent sketches! Man if that's what a 12" is capable under dark skies, I'm missing out

Thanks SAB. I should re-iterate that the sky conditions were extra good when these sketches were done. The homunculus was super with the three dark patches on the brighter lobe and the spike heading towards the two adjacent stars all very eveident at the eyepiece. I have gazed upon the Eight Burst Nebula many times and not really noticed the shell structure (particularly around its close in neighbour star), but on this occasion it was so evident. My optics were cooled and my collimation was dead on - all factors that effect what you can see. My scope is also f6 - so therefore throws up tighter stars (and possibly finer details) than the avg f5 scope and is a little more forgiving with focus and collimation which all helps.

Originally Posted by jakob

Nice work Andrew!

Originally Posted by ngcles

Hi Andrew & All,

Congrats mate and well done, excellent sketches -- particularly liked NGC 2442.

Best,

Les D
Contributing Editor
AS&T

Thanks Guys. It had been a while, but I am happy with how these turned out.

I noticed the images here at work (different monitor) look a bit grainy. I think I should have resized them smaller to be in line with their original image scale. Oh well never mind.