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 👍👍

12 hours ago, Gonzo said:

😉

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

On 28/02/2023 at 13:24, Naughty Neal said:

Kudos for a good first effort.  Sketching isn't something that  anyone can just manage or pickup, as an art form it can be very intimidating to try.  Some likely will not post their efforts for fear of being ridiculed but I say if one doesn't post then one won't get any reaction or feed back however good or bad.

The sketch section is one of my favourite on the forum and I enjoy seeing everyones efforts, there are a varying degrees of work and all are good to see however talented one is.

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

On 28/02/2023 at 19:23, Ratlet said:

That's magnificent.

What are the dimensions of the sketch?  What materials did you use?

 

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?

5 hours ago, mikeDnight said:

It looks pretty good to me, and not an easy target for a first time eyepiece sketch. We're all different in how and what we like to draw, and it will be nice to see how your sketching developes and where it takes you. 

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  

7 hours ago, josefk said:

I like it a lot @Dark Adaptation  not easy keeping up with the mountains and valleys and crater rims on that terminator is it? 😂

 

I assume that was Friday night because I see features in your sketch I also found eye catching on the same evening: https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/406188-first-time-lunar/#comment-4354316

 

 

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.

13 hours ago, DSviewer said:

I find SkySafari brilliant for not only navigating to but finding out about the deep sky targets such as M31 rise and set times etc

So do I, actually--though I use Stellarium more often than SkySafari. SkySafari is more useful when you're outside, though, and need a star map that radiates its own light.

On 13/01/2023 at 05:17, MartinB said:

Absolutely!  I need to make it clearer that for the great majority of challenges drawings are very welcome.

Thanks a lot! I don't have an astrophotography kit, and I really wanted to participate in these challenges.

Hi, I have a quick question. Would it be possible to submit a drawing of the constellation? With details about how I drew it? Or does it have to be photographed? I'm not thinking just dots for stars and lines connecting them like a star map--more like a drawing similar to what you would get if you captured the image with a camera.

Thanks!

1 hour ago, DaveL59 said:

As to another thread for #2, if someone wants to kick that off feel free, but if this really will be 2025 it'd be long since buried by then unless Mr Angry keeps us fuelled up with update rants on the tube.

Mr Angry 🤣 

One can hope...maybe let's wait for a bit.

Also, they couldn't make the parts on the Orion capsule waterproof enough to use?? What?

7 hours ago, DaveL59 said:

very much "some day" it seems 😞

 

 

I looked at the title of the video, and the "Unacceptable" part caught my eye. I don't think it's unacceptable--they're sending people to the moon! They still have to take the parts off the artemis rocket and put them into a new one and make sure all the gizmos work and ensure a safe environment, and then have to go through all the weather things and so on and so on. So don't get me wrong. I would love for it to launch as early as possible, I'm just thinking...2025 might just be realistic, when you count in all the variables.

Seriously though--should we have a second thread? Or is it too early for that?  

7 hours ago, DaveL59 said:

Funny it just started snowing here as it splashed down, wonder if it triggered that on its way down 😉 

Did the same here, maybe it did...

Orion has splashed down! And now for the thread, So Artemis 2 flight AKA Should launch some day, date pending! 😁

Here are some more:

A different crescent view:

A moon in the clouds:

And a view that I think it might be like to fly over the moon (still a legit image, edited to be at a different angle):

And Artemis 2 is TENTATIVELY scheduled for 2024. I'm just not sure if we could stand the suspense again--perhaps we will have so, Artemis 2 flight AKA Should Launch Someday, date pending.

See the First Stunning Photos of the Earth and Moon From Artemis 1!

Odd title, considering that I can see more of the Earth with my own eyes and more of the moon through my 2 inch telescope 🤣

Now this is a much better image ^^^^^

2 hours ago, DaveL59 said:

seems it has arrived

Nasa's Artemis spacecraft arrives at the Moon - BBC News

tho that first pic looks like a model offset from an old mouse mat 😉 

What's that grey thing beside the capsule?  

Ah, okay, thanks to all above! (And below, if anything else comes in). Especially good to know that the lens doesn't come off too.