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Roel

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Everything posted by Roel

  1. During the autumn holidays I spent a week with my son (14) on La Palma. Stargazing was not at the top of the priority list this time and, moreover, the island suffered from a heat wave + associated atmospheric dust in the first days. Temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius and skies comparable to an average night on my Dutch "dark" observing site. Not bad, but it didn't encourage an all-nighter either. Nonetheless, there were a few pretty good evenings, including the one on October 17. That evening I saw Andromeda's Parachute for the first time and later that night the Horse's Head was clearly visible (the correct "viewing direction" of the Horse was visible), and of course you would kill for such a sky in the Netherlands. Logged a few objects, such as some globular clusters in M31, and I made just one deep sky sketch: the breathtaking planetary nebula NGC 246 or “Skull Nebula”. This planetary nebula does not rise very high above the horizon in our regions, but this is very different on La Palma. What a beautiful object! At first, the brightest parts, in combination with three stars, look like a somewhat elongated baboon's head with two eyes and a mouth, but soon you notice the fainter parts that make the sphere almost completely round. The skull shape actually disappears a bit and the object becomes a large clear ball of flakes with razor-sharp transitions in some places, like a kind of peel. I actually wasn't planning on making a sketch at all, but this nebula screamed so loudly that I just had to!
  2. Thanks! Fortunately the Moon is so bright, dark adaptation is irrelevant while sketching the moon, which is very convenient. I use a normal white headlight.
  3. Thanks, Ratlet an Neil! The sketch is made on black paper with a white pastel (for the background) and a white + black pastel pencil for the finer details. It's relatively easy to render a equally shaded area with pastels by rubbing the powdery pastel material with a fingertip, or with special "blending stumps". The sketch is completely done at the eyepiece. The image is an unedited photograph of the actual sketch, no alterations afterwards (apart from the black frame and text).
  4. On Februari 7 the sky was clear and the Moon was already quite high in the southeast, so I dragged the 16" Propdob out of the workshop and set it up in the backyard. It was freezing cold and the seeing was only moderate. A magnification of 178x was about the maximum achievable. The beautiful crater Petavius however was just perfectly illuminated by the sun. The large crack in the crater floor was striking, but due to the poor seeing, the smaller cracks (Rimae Petavius) unfortunately remained invisible. Nonetheless, the view was nice enough to pick up the good old pastel pencils. I hadn't made a lunar sketch in months, so it was about time. 75 minutes later, this was the final result:
  5. Tuesday night, just got home from the late shift. Clear skies! The Moon is almost full and is about 30 degrees above the horizon in the south. Judging by a few low altitude stars, the seeing seems quite decent and (with the beautiful observing session of Saturday evening still in mind) I roll the large Dobson into the backyard. The first look through the eyepiece is a bit disappointing: the seeing is unfortunately not as good as I hoped. After an hour of cooling with the built-in fans, things improve considerably, but unfortunately it won't be as great as Saturday. During moments of steady atmosphere, the maximum useful magnification is around 300x – I decide that's good enough for a moon sketch! Vallis Schröteri in particular looks stunning, and just screams: “sketch me, sketch me, sketch me!”, but I still opt for the more modest crater duo Hansteen (45km) and Billy (46km). Almost equal in size, but very different in appearance. Hansteen appears to have a somewhat deeper bottom and a central "peak" is visible, as well as some terraces and lighter details on the bottom. On the southwest side, a narrow Rima follows an unusual route towards a duo of smaller craters, including Hansteen B. The northern crater rim is less pronounced and subtly merges into a kind of plateau. Billy is completely different: completely filled with lava, creating a dark flat cast floor. Even in the moments of the best seeing, virtually no detail is visible on that floor. The crater rim is narrow, steep and sharp. The mountain area of Mons Hansteen is very special. It has the shape of a narrow fan, or a wide footprint. The mountains are bright white and are isolated in a somewhat darker flat area. It strongly reminds me of Uluru in Australia. Lots of detail visible: ridges and small cracks. The sketch is made on black paper with a white pastel (for the background) and a white + black pastel pencil for the finer details. Visually there were many more and finer details visible, but after more than two hours of sketching I called it a night. What a wonderfully relaxing observing session this was!
  6. Here's another sketch made during the holiday to La Palma at the end of August. The well-known Trifid Nebula gave an overwhelming impression from the garden of the holiday home in Las Tricias. Especially after searching for some obscure and peripheral stuff for a while, M20's nebula-party almost blew me off my observation chair! I liked the image without a filter through the 9mm Nagler best - the exit pupil created a kind of "sweet spot" where the dark lanes became the most contrasty. It was not easy to put those lanes on paper: some were deep black and wide, others were faint and barely distinguishable from the nebula. The "lobes" can also be seen from the Netherlands on a good transparent night, but the sight of this object under a really dark sky is downright insane. Truly one of the absolute highlights of the summer Milky Way.
  7. Last August I spent another week on the dazzling island of La Palma. All by myself, but in the company of a 40cm Dobson and 8×42 binoculars. I rented a small house near the village of Las Tricias, on the edge of a deep gorge. It's certainly not my first time on the island, but every time the first sight of the summer galaxy makes a deep impression. All those light tufts, dark spots and streaks from horizon to horizon; even without a telescope it is nice to be under such a sky! The very brightest part of the Milky Way is located just above the “Spout of the Teapot” in Sagittarius and even has a special name: the Great Sagittarius Cloud (not to be confused with the Small Sagittarius Cloud, M24). In fact, it is a peek through the dust clouds, roughly towards the core of our Milky Way. The true core is two degrees west of the Great Sagittarius Cloud, but unfortunately its view is completely obscured by interstellar dust. To the naked eye, the Cloud is already extremely bright and a bit flaky, but the area looks downright spectacular through binoculars. This piece of sky in the 8×42 was perhaps the most impressive sight of the entire observation week. I decided (stretched out on a lounger) to make a sketch of it, but as I drew it I started to wonder more and more what on earth I got myself into. So many stars! So many dark spots! And it was no fun ergonomically either. Observe for a while, remember what you see, put down binoculars, draw, and look again. Of course it is impossible to place every speck of light correctly, but the sketch does give a fairly good impression of the visual impression. The end result below is the original field sketch, scanned and inverted.
  8. Roel

    Roel's drawings

    Sketches from behind the eyepiece, sketches from photographs.
  9. Roel

    Plato

    From the album: Roel's drawings

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