Here's a nice strong one, with a glory at the center as one would expect. First time I've seen such strong supernumary arcs. If the Sun is lower, the arc ending at the sky will be more vertical.
Surprised I could see the galaxy in Bortle 8. 20260918_0600 UT. View is with 7-in (180mm) Mak, diagonal-reversed, 270x. Used Sketchbook on tablet. Yes the SN is brighter than the galaxy or its core!
Seems this is turned off at the sub level. When trying to help people or point something out, being able to put an image in the reply section would be good.
Thanks.
Sorry for the new post, I couldn't attach an image to my reply....
The stars on your map, circled here are 3 magnitudes brighter than Neptune, so they would be dead easy in comparison. If you have binoculars, use them to confirm any of your unusual sightings.
Give it a go and report back!
And if it is a flaring geosat, they do that for about a week, but 4 minutes earlier each night,.
Cloudy last night but clear in the morning (Sep 1). This is only my 20th or so lunar sketch, took me about 80 minutes. I see that I'm still including too many features for my beginner art skill level. I do like using layers to control the sky color independent of the surface. Used a polarizer to fight the brightening sky. flipped the image to normal orientation. From bottom to top Seleucus, Eddington, Russell. Sun co 148.
This session I had more time. With the soft seeing at low altitude, and my limited skills, this is about the most I can do. High illumination helps to keep the detail from being overwhelming. Flipped view with diagonal.
Est mag 7.6, slight yellow, not as orange as brighter fieldstar. Note orientation flip.
Baby steps on a long journey... I need to learn that I don't have to sketch the entire field. There's a pretty decent libration for Mare Humboltianum ongoing this week in the Moon's upper right, I did this on Aug 19. I knew the Moon was low and between trees, but I can now see, again, that I'm not fast. I only had time to get positions roughed and a few shadows started before it disappeared on me. Reversed view with diagonal here. Atlas and Hercules to left.
I returned to visual for the peace it gives me, and I've been doing the Sissy Haas double star list (2000+ targets!). I’m not measuring, but simply eyeballing position angle (PA) and separation, then checking the numbers in SkySafari. HD 181752 caught me off guard, 8.6 arc sec for the close one (I guessed 8) and 60 for the far one. Nope! 92 arcsec. Didn't think I could be that far off. Kinda like the fact that you can fit 10 full Moons across the Big Dipper bowl. No way! Yep.
I can't figure out what to do next, I'm overwhelmed. I've always loved star clusters, so thought that observing the Collinders would make a neat project. There are missing ones on SkySafari. Get a pdf of Collinder's original paper with his notes, start observing and run into conundrums. Start reading Archinal and Hynes. Hmmm, oh it's clear and I'm looking at.double stars. Wait, that value isn't right. Find out about Stelle Doppie. Cool reference. Rain tonight but clear in morning so sketching Orientale. NASA SVS has fantastic simulation I can compare with. When's the next time for good libration? What's a good app for android? Friend asks about weather planning for Perseids. Better have a look at the Sun while there are gaps in the clouds. Flip through some.Reddit posts. What should I go after during the star party? Need to see what that Pegasus SmartEye does from a dark site. Another night in the city! Gee that double star reminds me of the NGC 1502 field, I wonder if the stars are a weak cluster? Not in A&H book, but I have GAIA access. Email asks me if I want my Kent Wallace PN book back... right, I can do high surface brightness PNs from the backyard along with doubles and carbon stars. I still have the obs from last year to organize into their constellation files and folders.I think I need a 10mm eyepiece for my Mak. Oh, a newcomer to the club needs help collimating. I need to get some eyepiece time to Zen!
Raining last night forecast to clear, so got up at 530 am and had lovely view of Third Quarter Moon while listening to birdsong. An advantage to bright sky is that the normally overwhelming detail is subdued. Still a beginner sketcher, so it took me 90 minutes. White rims a little too white.
Up at 440x with 180mm Maksutov. It's hard to convey the piercing quality while maintaining color, so I've used a "sparkle" pen. I also drew in the broken diffraction rings, 120 degrees apart which to me indicates I have a slight pinched cell.
95 Herculis is a gorgeous cat's eye pair, zeta Lyrae a nice gold and pale blue, both easy in the smallest of scopes. Last night I had a lovely tranquil time from midnight to 2 am jumping from double to double. Couldn't have done it without the goto, I could only see Vega, Deneb, Altair, and Arcturus, barely Alkaid at the end of the Dipper's handle. Thankfully the smoke from Washington and Oregon wildfires was aloft and not at breathing level. Mosquitoes found their way through thick hiking socks.
More on deck for tonight! Going to make myself a 60mm off-axis mask for the Maksutov to see what the Double Double looks like.
that my eyes could see. The camera picked it up, a single tiny red LED from a battery charger. The more you experience the night and the tech, the more cool non-alien things you find out about nature and how your senses can mislead you.
Is short-staffing a normal thing in Victoria? I am out-of-province with parent at Amica. Now and then regular services like once-a-week bathing don't happen, and dinner service is slow.
I assume that this is standard nasty business practice to not give staff enough time to get benefits, so staff leave out of frustration... combined with low wages, where they need two wait-table jobs. The people are wonderful, deserve more I assume.
Have I got this right? Or is this a single facility issue?
This deserves a full article... here are some basics. I am surprised at how few are doing this, perhaps I happen to lie demographically between folk comfortable with pencil and paper, and digital era people who are enamored with imaging and don't sketch.
iOS folk who are artists seem to like Procreate. Sketchbook is free and works cross platform. You can run it on your phone if just to try it, but you really need the larger real estate of a tablet. For a whopping $6 I went Pro in order to make and save custom brushes and modify the brush icons so I could tell the difference between them under very low red light.
Each sketch starts with a classic open circle below the description and data zone. The circle is transparent so I can change the underlying background from black to light pollution gray or daylight powder blue or gray gradient for lunar. I then load a layer above for stars, and another layer for neb. I use a thicker pen for brighter stars, a thin one for dots, an airbrush for soft glows, large and small, a blend brush to smooth the changes from a bright inner zone to a fainter outer one, a blending stump to "push" paint around, sharpen up sipral arms next to dark lanes.
I'm very much in exploratory mode as I have yet to find someone to mentor me. There are no hits on Google for "tutorial to use a tablet to make a sketch of a globular star cluster" etc.
Where the tablet scores for my use case is twofold: ability to zoom in and add tiny detail; keep the light really faint. A year ago I got back into sketching with paper and pencil and found my 60+ year aging eyes needed a strong magnifier AND super bright red light to see what I did (or didn't) put on paper.
I'm happy to answer questions and show sample objects, but I don't have a library yet so replies may take a while.
Direct on tablet version. I quite like adding light and dark airbrush on a black background, feels more intuitive to me. Slight cheat: I screencopy the starfield from SkySafari, import it, then edit the star sizes to match my visual view. On another layer I add the neb.
Being able to zoom to 400% allows me to place dots and adjust smudges, better than I was able with pencil and eraser.
A side benefit of looking to see if the not-yet Blaze Star has popped is simply stepping outside and connecting with the sky. It's a pity in hindsight I haven't kept a direct count, but it's got to be 100 observing sessions a year for the last 3 years! Of course most of those were 5 minutes, yet there is a satisfaction of seeing the rock steady reliability of the sky, always a nice therapy to counter the high octane civilization that permeates our lives.
I don't expect to be the first person to notice it, after all there are a bunch of automated systems monitoring T CrB, but I hope I get to see it before our astro news feed erupts. And simply it would be cool to look up and see our sky has changed. And maybe the ultimate coincidence of another nova nearby.
Thanks so much for creating the sub! I was over on the stargazing sub where everyone posts their shot of the Milky Way centered on M8. Yawn.
I am a 95% visual observer, naked eye (meteors) through binocs, to a mid-size Mak I use in suburban backyard, to a Dob under dark skies and the odd peek through our club’s large 30+ inch scope. Being outside is for me, even at full Moon and high latitude twilight.
I've returned to sketching after a long hiatus, but I've completely switched over to a tablet and the free app Sketchbook. I really appreciate being able to layer soft neb over stars and add dark neb. Favorite brush is undo! Here’s a sketch to start off, Collinder 69, the head of Orion, used my 71mm travel scope.
For city dwellers, many interesting double stars are visible from your backyard/balcony. Doubles may not be your mojo, but eye to eyepiece beats a lot of other activities. I like the peace.
Here's Xi Scorpii at 311x. To split the bright tight component, the atmosphere has to be fairly quiet.
