Blind and no bluff

Contour drawing, I’m talking about – but with no contours, either. Still, it helps – I’m convinced you see more when you do it.

As usual, when I plan to get up early I end up getting a whopping 6-hours sleep! I rolled out of bed at 3 am, was observing at 3:30 am – but that’s also when the first hints of astronomical twilight start. (Most people wouldn’t notice this, but when you’re looking at faint objects it makes a difference. )

I did some quick hopping with the 15-inch from the globulars M10 and M12 to the globular-like open cluster, M11. I love this one. The pattern of closely-spaced stars looks to me like the lighted streets of a well laid-out town as seen from the air. But I’ve been experimenting with blind contour drawing a little and I decided to give it a try on this cluster.

In this type of drawing you look at the paper only once – when you put your pencil down at first. From that point on you trace out the contour of what you see by having your hand and pencil move in sync with your eye. Artists are familiar with this exercise. Some use it as a warm-up because it improves your concentration and you see more detail. Seems perfect for the sky at night where looking at the paper only harms the light sensitivity of your eyes.

But – I’ve been wanting to try it on an open cluster. Now there’s no contours involved, You're simply trying to put down dots of differet intensity, showing their relationship to one another. This is tricky to do when you’re looking at the paper. It may be easier to do if you can just get your left brain out of the way and let your right brain, eye, and fingers work together without interference.

And it works! No – I’m not going to show you the finished drawing. It isn’t important, though I will say when I brought it in the house and compared it with pictures of this cluster, it was remarkably accurate – well, accurate in an impressionistic sort of way – for the most part the correct distance between stars and possitions seemed to be there. Need to experiment more. What was important is that as soon as I started to do this I started to notice more stars and to become more conscious of the differences in brightness of ones I ha dnoted earlier. And that’s the goal – to focus on what you are seeing and see it better.

It was 4 am when I finished this experiment – the actual drawing took maybe three minutes - and the light was quite noticeable. I switched to the Double Double and had a clean, wide split at 187X with the 9 mm. Well – not as clean as I would like – there were still streamers jumping off all the stars and sometimes interfering. I don’t know if this was caused by the seeing, but Vega had been a nice clean dot at lower powers. I need to check the collimation. Meanwhile, I decided to wait and see if the view would improve as it got lighter. My reasoning was the stars were simply too bright in the 15-inch mirror and less contrast with the background might help. After about 20 minutes I did notice some improvement, but not much. Ah well . . . next time . . .