On the night of December 28, 2019 we had some very clear skies. While the transparency and seeing weren't great, the lack of clouds made up for it. It has been a few weeks since I've had clear skies on a night that I could get out with the telescope, so I took full advantage. I managed to sketch a few objects that night with M36 being the first object of the night. At one point in the night a few clouds decided to come in, but they didn't stay long, and it went right back to being clear within a couple minutes. Overall, the temperature was pretty good that night and managed to hover around the 30F mark throughout my time out at the eyepiece. Given that I had clear skies, and it wasn't below 0 outside I took full advantage.
As I mentioned, and as you can see in the image above, I sketched Messier 36 which is an open cluster in Auriga. The apparent magnitude of this cluster is about 6.3, and approximately 4100 light years from Earth. M36 contains roughly 60 stars and is said to be similar to the star cluster M45, also known as the Pleiades. It is said that if M36 were as close as M45 then it would be just as bright as they both have a similar size. However M36 is one of the most distant open clusters in the Messier catalog, but can still be easily seen in a low power telescope or a pair of binoculars. The bright stars of the cluster form an almost 'x' shape, and even more stars in the cluster would be visible in an even bigger telescope than what I'm using. Open clusters are groups of younger stars, astronomically speaking, M36 is relatively young at about 25 million years old.
In the video above you can watch a timelapse of the sketching process. I do plan on doing a video of the post processing of the sketch in Gimp where I invert the image, and fix the stars. In this sketch I used only one pencil, an HB to mark off the stars. There was no haze or nebulosity in this so there was no need for a softer pencil or a blending stump. Pretty basic as far as sketches go.
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| M36 - Pinwheel Cluster, and open cluster in Auriga |
In the video above you can watch a timelapse of the sketching process. I do plan on doing a video of the post processing of the sketch in Gimp where I invert the image, and fix the stars. In this sketch I used only one pencil, an HB to mark off the stars. There was no haze or nebulosity in this so there was no need for a softer pencil or a blending stump. Pretty basic as far as sketches go.
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