Astronomy Geeks in NE Florida
I've never been into drawing, doodling, painting, and the like. But with my focus being entirely on visual astronomy, I started getting the itch to try my hand at sketching since I felt left out from the astrophotographers in a sense always getting to share their views with everyone publicly. Tonight was my first night since my daughter was born seven weeks ago that I took the dob out for some DSO viewing in my Bortle 7 backyard. Saw M31 and 32 and also saw the Double Cluster for the first time and man, it blew me away. Then I landed on the Pleiades and decided it was finally time to break out the sketch equipment for the first time since I bought it 3 months ago. I need to learn how to better touch up my imperfect stars in GIMP as all I did was invert the colors, but I am otherwise pretty pleased with how it turned out.
Ok, did a little more post-processing and am much happier with this as it more accurately depicts the whole starfield with the fainter stars as easy to see in this sketch as they were at the eyepiece.