Some Simple Solar Sketches in Sunny Summer Skies

After recently trading my DS Solarmax 40 towards another scope, I was left without anything to observe the sun in H-alpha. So, in the past number of days, I picked up a second-hand PST to see me through the summer months ( I eventually hope to get some sort of large-aperture h-alpha scope but that's another story). Today, I decided to try my hand at some simple sketching of proms on the Sun.

The first three are of the same prom.

www.astroshot.com/Solar/Sketches/2008%20...209-25am%20prom1.jpg

www.astroshot.com/Solar/Sketches/2008%20...010-15am%20prom1.jpg

www.astroshot.com/Solar/Sketches/2008%20...pm%20Sun%20prom1.jpg

This one of another prom:

www.astroshot.com/Solar/Sketches/2008%20...pm%20Sun%20prom2.jpg

Obviously, these aren't exactly what I would describe as works of art. My sketching skills are very poor but I guess if I am to improve, I have to start somewhere and that may as well be at the bottom!

I simply used white paper and a pencil. Images scanned in and then inverted afterwards. 12mm Kellner eyepiece and 2x barlow.

I would greatly appreciate constructive advice on how to improve my sketching.

Regards & Clear Skies,

Michael --

Nice start!

Two pieces of advice that I got early on (that would be several weeks ago ) were:

1) Use black paper and a white water-color pencil. The pencil is really annoying because it needs sharpening about 10 times as often as a graphite pencil, but the black paper doesn't nuke you semi-dark-adapted vision the way that white paper does.

2) Beginning sketchers almost always over-exagerate the curvature of the solar limb. You certainly didn't do it as badly as I did, but they're still probably a bit over-curved.

I really like your last one. I spent so much time sketching the other prominence/filament that I didn't even see that one.

Cheers,
-- Jeff.

Thanks Jeff. I appreciate that.

interesting images Michael, the sun is certainly active, would you not try the webcam on it instead ??

Sketching is a different sort of thing to astrophotography. I would normally go running for the camera but have decided to give sketching a try for a while. I found that I notice the little detail more - slight changes in prom shapes and sizes etc are more noticable when sketching.

I've a few more sketches from today but will post them all together in a little while.

Three sketches of the one single prom changing over the course of this morning before the cloud arrived:

www.astroshot.com/Solar/Sketches/2008%20...02%20Sun%2009-35.jpg

www.astroshot.com/Solar/Sketches/2008%20...05%20and%2011-36.jpg

Sun graphic produced using Tilting Sun software www.atoptics.co.uk/tiltsun.htm

Again, constructive comments on improving the sketches would be welcome.