Large format Leo Triplet sketch

One of the guys on CloudyNights started up a thread for everyone to share their Leo Triplet sketches. The instrument I do most of my sketching through can't manage to fit any 2 of them in the same field, so I was sort of out of luck.

But I did want to join in the fun, so I decided to attempt a composite. I already had individual sketches of 2 of the galaxies, so I did a sketch of the third through the 16" Mak, and then a wide-field sketch of the field stars and galaxy positions through my 4" doublet.

I scanned all 4 sketches, boosted the contrast to extreme levels, and then printed them out to the same scale. I taped the printouts together on a window with a large piece of sketch paper in front, and then traced the field stars and galaxy positions. The light didn't come through 3 layers very well, so I had to cut holes in the wide-field printout behind where the 3 narrow-field printouts were.

I then copied in the galaxy details from the original sketches.

My putty rubber pinched for doing the dust lane in NGC3628.

The finished sketch.

(This one is really better at more than 800 pixels, so I encourage you to zoom out your web browser window and look at it here: www.rokeby.ie/observatory/Sketches/LeoComposite.1200.jpg .)

Cheers,
-- Jeff.

That's very nice work Jeff! Very impressive!
All in, that must have taken quite some time!

Out of curiosity, how long would you spend observing and drawing each individual sketch?

Michael.

Michael --

For galaxies, most of the variability is in viewing rather than sketching. I'd say each of the 3 sketches took me about 15min, but it took much longer to pick out the detail in M65 than the others. I'd say I spent about a total of an hour on it, 20min on M66, and 30min on NGC3628.

Globulars don't take me nearly as long to figure out what I'm looking at, but the sketch itself can take 30 - 45min.

Cheers,
-- Jeff.