Found an old sketchbook that contained some astronomy sketches I did from back in 2012. I definitely need to get into sketching again. As beautiful as pictures are, you get to gaze at the beauty of space while you sketch. The longer you look the more detail you start to notice. They also are a more accurate representation of what you see through your telescope. I would love to do a comparison of these sketches done with my 6" Newtonian and my 8" SCT with a focal reducer. The field of view will be smaller, but I should hopefully be able to see the same amount, if not more, detail since the 6" Newtonian is an F/6 and the 8" SCT with the focal reducer is an F/6.3.
Astronomy photos, or astrophotography, is a bunch of images taken with long exposures stacked and edited to bring out the fainter details you can't see with your eye at the eyepiece. While sketches might be slightly more exaggerated to bring out the detail you do see, all that is drawn is exactly what you see at the eyepiece.
Maybe in future sketches I'll include star colors. Rarely do any deep sky objects contain any color at the eyepiece other than planetary nebula. I have read that some people claim to see some color when looking at the Orion Nebula in dark sky sites, but I have yet to experience that myself, but if any nebula were to show color I wouldn't be surprised that M42 would given how dense and bright the nebula is.
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