I thoroughly enjoy sketching at the eyepiece when observing. Not only does taking the time to make a sketch encourage the observation of finer details, it serves as an excellent record of one's observations and is of greater use than a textual description.

As the recent poor weather continues, I have been going through some recent observations and picked out some highlights below.

I well remember recently working my way through the Herschel 400 open clusters in Cassiopeia. As I moved towards M103, I found that I could just fit 4 lovely clusters, each with their own characteristics, into one field of view. The resulting sketch took several hours over a couple of nights to complete and is well worth the additional effort even though it slowed my progress through my observing list.

NGC 891 was my nemesis object. I read in awe of people who were picking this out in small scopes and yet I could not see it through my 8.5" newtonian. Yet, after my umpteenth time of searching I finally managed to get it, right at the limit of vision. Now, with some experience I can almost observe it when the conditions allow. Now, if only I could get that dust lane as well!!

Finally, I now regularly notice the bright star forming region NGC 604 in the galaxy M33 for example but up until a few years ago, I didn’t even know it was there. I first found this exciting object by observing M33 for an hour. Whilst I could say that I did pick up hints of the spiral arms, it was while making the sketch that I noticed a small, fuzzy patch of nebulosity embedded within the glow of the galaxy. After digging around in various references, I realised that I had made an independent discovery of NGC604, a large star forming region larger than the Orion Nebula and even the Tarantula Nebula, albeit 200 years to claim any rights!

I have put some more information to describe my approach to sketching on my website if you are interested.