We have had mostly cloudy skies this week, but the cover broke for a little while last evening, and I was able to get in about 30 minutes of stargazing before heading to bed. The temps were fairly comfortable last evening, around +16 ℉, which was nice. I've learned not to spend much time agonizing over what to target for the sketch. I just quickly find something that looks interesting and is in a convenient viewing angle and direction. Using the SV407 wide angle binocs, I noticed a little triplet of stars near Orion, which I later learned were φ₁, φ₂, and λ Ori. Then I sketched them using the 12x60 binocs. This sketch is from my front yard:
When I first went outside, the sky looked darker than usual, and the stars were numerous and crisp. But after about 30 minutes into my sketch, it became dim and fuzzy again. Not sure if it was clouds coming back, or the moon getting near the horizon. My binocs had a few specs of frost on them but didn't look to bad.
I realized, about halfway into the sketch, that I was drawing the angular distances larger than the scale I had set for myself. Then I went back to following my scale. So the sketch is a little messed up due to that.
The two dim stars off to the right appeared very fuzzy when I was viewing them, so that I wondered if it might be some deep sky object. But they are just stars, according to Stellarium, with no deep sky objects in that FOV.
I felt a little bad going out stargazing without Micah, on a nice warm evening like that. But it was getting pretty late (by our standards) and I knew our three year old would want to go outside too, if Micah came out. So I just snuck out and back in quietly without disturbing the children.
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