Dark Adaptation

Well, I went and looked at my weather forecast for the week. The resulting predictions did not look astronomy-friendly, and I was about to be seriously annoyed. Then I remembered that stargazing means going outside, and going outside means getting cold, and being cold is uncomfortable. Maybe I can just pretend I'm stargazing from the comfort of my warm bed.

My attempt at capturing the moon and earth in one shot. I don't quite recall the exact equipment used to capture this picture, but I believe it was with a pair of 10x50 binoculars and an almost-dead children's camera 😂. Edited in Gimp to improve contrast, as well attempting (but not really achieving) noise reduction. I could never get the hang of the noise reduction function in Gimp . Looking at it, it's so buttery, you could almost believe that you could pluck it from the sky and spread it on toast...as long as you don't mind rocks and the footprints of astronauts on your breakfast.

Thank you, I was a little unclear on those moon definitions.

My picture of the Blue Supermoon of August 30th, 2023! Pictures taken with Mak60 telescope and phone, and also without telescope. One thing I don't understand: Why do they call it a "Blue Moon" if it isn't blue? And also, why is it named a "Supermoon" if it doesn't look enormous, or at least abnormally large? One explanation is that where I live, my skyline is quite a bit higher than the actual horizon, so would that destroy the optical illusion of "Super"?

Well done, everybody! These are some excellent pieces of art.

Well done to everybody! Those are some exquisite photographs 👍👍

I noticed that! 😂 But me being me, I completely forgot about it a few minutes later.

I agree, one of my favorite forums is the sketch forum. Some of the drawings here are just amazing!

Thank you! On the dimensions of the sketch, it's somewhere around 8.5 inches across, and 7 inches tall. I did the sketch on plain 8.5x11 printer paper, and used a plain #2 Mechanical pencil. I edited the background from white to black using Gimp. Amazing what you can do with just a pencil, isn't it?

Thanks, @mikeDnight! Hopefully it will take me down a good path.

My first drawing through the eyepiece! (Or, a collection of well placed lines.) I knew it would be hard to draw celestial objects, so of course I went and drew the hardest of them all (in my range, at any rate). The craters and mountain ranges were a little difficult, but the really hard part was the shape of the maria. That's probably obvious to anyone who knows the Moon well--and to those people, don't mind the fact that maria is misshapen 😂.

This is a good idea--I was starting to worry about the amount of non-entry posts that were in the contest thread @josefk I should have thought of drawing my moon picture much smaller to make it harder to spot mistakes; perhaps I can do that with another entry

Thank you--and you are nearly correct. I was actually sketching on Saturday, though it was close enough to midnight that it might as well have been Sunday. Now, crater rims. Those are what I call hard. Especially at low magnification

Well, I'll bite. Here is my submission! The medium I used is purely mechanical pencil and my thumb (for smudging) on a piece of scratch paper, and I must admit--it was rather difficult, sitting outside for an hour with my hands freezing off in -15 degrees C temperatures 😁. Sketching at the eyepiece was something completely new to me, and I'm not an amateur artist (I think). I chose the Moon because the telescope I own--a Maksutov-Cassegrain 60mm--isn't powerful enough to magnify anything else into greater detail than a smudge. I did not go into too much detail with the drawing, mostly because my fingers felt about as mobile as breakfast sausages by halfway in, but also because every time I looked at some small detail, it disappeared. If I moved my eyes away to some different part, there it was again. So I settled for just an outline, with the most obvious craters and mountain ranges. Throughout the course of my sketch, I discovered some interesting details: 1) Quite a few of the noticeable craters on the Moon come in threes! 2) The Moon moves out of the eyepiece at an alarming rate; 3) The bottom side of the Moon was rather lumpy, since the edges were actually mountain ranges; 4) I had never found a use for tilting the eyepiece of the telescope until now--if the telescope is in front of me, I can't very well draw with my knees knocking it. So I had to move it to the side, and tilt the eyepiece. Lastly of all was drawing without looking. This is another thing I don't usually do, but this time, since it takes my eyes a moment to focus on the image, I had to do it. And it didn't turn out badly! The scale and location of the "seas" might be slightly (all right, noticeably) off, but not enough to bother me. I edited the photo slightly using Gimp, but only to fill the background from white to black, giving it a more authentic look. Doing anything else would be obvious to anybody who looked closely.