Fraunhoffer

After 2 months of sketching, dodging the weather and rotation, I managed to see the whole disk.🤩

The numbers are Martian longitude, planet rotation left to right, south at the bottom.

I need another project now. 🤔🤔😂

Pencils and crayons at the ready....

Following this thread with interest.

I found a link to the Messier catalogue online somewhere that was listed by month. I'll add it if i can find it again. Some were too low for the urbanisation i live in, but it was good fun chasing them down. I missed a few first round so will have to revisit. There is also a list generated by Loughton astronomical society online that can be downloaded.

After some mixed weather, the sky cleared. I had a super time observing mars from 11 right through till 5, with the odd snooze. Just amazing to see to see the planet slowly revolve as the time ticked by.

The see ing was quite good, interupted with a few breezes and hazy cloud from time to time. It got hazy towards 5 so i packed up. 

I swapped between a neodymium filter and a red filter from time to time. The red made the darker areas really dark and outlined. I thought the neodymium allowed slightly more subtle shades to show, even thought it became quite bright.

H2 and HB pencils and orange crayon on paper with a small led clip on reading lamp.

SCT 8 with a 2x barlow and 12mm bst ep. Interestingly i found the Barlow and 12mm have a much better quality image than the 8mm or 5mm bst. 

North is at the top. First sketch at right about 11pm. Rotation left to right.

Very nice sketches and follow through of the sessions. Hellas basin too. 👍 

11 minutes ago, jetstream said:

Excellent.

The reason for my interest is I think you are seeing a feature called the Pleiades Bubble as coined by Bartels. Seeing nebulosity like this with an SCT at 3mm exit pupil and filters is a vg achievement.

In my own pursuit of this beautiful object I have gone widefield and actually the Heritage 130 with a 24mm ES 68 is a superb instrument to see more of this feature. If you can get to yet darker skies and with a widefield newt (or proven frac) there is more to see.

Keep on obsevring this target...theres more.

Ah. Thank you. I shall look that up.
ill have to go again now 🙂

20 minutes ago, jetstream said:

@Fraunhoffer- very very interesting sketch of the Pleiades. Have you tried no filter? out of curiousity how dark were the skies there?

Nice work, Gerry

Thanks.
Not sure how to say how dark it was. Certainly a lot darker than home. Although it wasnt black dark. The milky way was clearly visible with direct vision overhead - less so towards the horizon.
Without the filter the sky was a very dark grey. The UHC-E filter was best. It turned the sky inky black. The nebulosity was very faint and needed averted vision as it drifted in and out of view.

4 minutes ago, Beulah said:

Lovely set of sketches; really captures what can be seen through the eyepiece. I've seen that scintillating nebulosity of the Pleiades through 8 inches of aperture in a dark sky....

Thanks. They were like looking at a black bag of diamonds. Quite breathtaking. 
It all made the journey to get away from the houses and lights very worthwhile.

I was fortunate to visit a place with much darker skies than my home, recently and managed to actually eyeball some faint objects.
It was real thrill to see these.
The orientation is probably back to front for these L-R or N-S depending on how my diagonal ended up to get comfortable.

Great sketch. Thanks for the tip about Mars mapper. I too struggle to align sketches with a map. I've been using sky and telescopes Mars Profiler, which shows what's visible at any date and time. It has a flat map projection though.

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I did have another Mars sketch but posted this instead. Although we had some slight mist which obscured most deep sky objects. Clusters and planets shone in the still air. Not a wobble.

Here are the flying ducks. Beautiful bright star near the middle and the dark band of dust creating the distictive v pattern was very contrasty.

C8 + 26 and 15 mm EPs.

Super read. Just getting into seeing Mars now in 2020.

Thanks

Nice sketch. I was thinking of some pre-prepared blanks aswell. 😁. 

The air was very bumpy after the late rain shower. Was thrilled to get another view of Mars. Managed to get a picture of the small blurry disc too. I've seen much better pictures on here, but I was chuffed to get this on an old DSLR.

Nice sketch and range of tones.

I like the black background.

My first view of Mars through my telescope from the back garden. 

There were quite a few wispy clouds about that resulted in shimmering orange mess from time to time. Between those were some nice views through my old second hand c8.

After missing about with a few filters, I settled on an orange one. The polar caps were clear, one larger than the other. Some of the larger features were also visible.

I must dig out my dew bands next time as things were just beginning to dew up when I finished. 

I had some nice views of Jupiter and Saturn before this and ended with Venus.

This sketch is back to front because of the diagonal.

I have a bresser 102/600s on an exos 2. I've been very pleased with it. Initially the exos 2 had the dive motors on, which are fine. It has a load capacity of 13kg, which means I can also put a c8 on it which I got later on. 

It's also possible to upgrade the exos 2 to goto later on if you wish. (As I did).

The bresser 127 has 4 lenses that's why  is bigger and heavier. Mine has the old focusser. The new hexafoc sounds a great idea, but I've not tried.

Based on a new st80 and my old bresser,  and what I've seen in the shops before lockdown I think the bresser is made better.

Just to point out that the bresser uses Meade/explore scientific type finder shoe so will need to adapt if you want to put something else on.

I didn't think much to the stock bresser 6x30 finder. Awful. I made an adapter for a SW right image 9x50 which was better. 

I thought the stock bresser plossl 25mm ep was quite good. 

The exos 2 and the 102/600s cost me about 250 on the well used market which I thought was a good deal, so it's worth hunting.

Ah great thread. Ive been doing some sketching ( of various things) recently and been trying artistically enhancing some of my rather crummy images too using paintshop and others. So they have probably ended up being mostly digital art. Painting with a mouse is not the same feel as brush and pen though.

Thanks for the encouragement to look at Mars. It's just clearing the trees and houses before daybreak for me. Next clear sky I will defo be up early to look.

I missed it last time around, so this will be first for a long time. Looking forward to it.

Very nice.

Great sketches. 

Super sketches. Thanks.

+1 for the iceinspace list. It's always in my observing box.

Just found this. Awesome project. I e there was a sunspotter on a recent sky at night program. I think it was the commercial one though.