stella nix

The simple answer is that smartphone astrophotography kinda sucks. It's not easy and it ends up distracting you from doing the actual astronomy you've gone outside to do. Like, you can do it and get some good results if you have the right equipment and you know what you're doing, but especially as a beginner neither of those are likely to be true. Astrophotos need a long exposure, which means your telescope has to accurately track the rotation of the Earth, which means a much more expensive mount.

Telescope sellers often put a cheap smartphone adapter in the box because they know beginners won't buy it if there isn't one, but really, you're probably just going to be frustrated if you actually try to use it.

Astrophotography and Visual Astronomy are really different hobbies, and require different equipment. The former is much more expensive, requiring expensive cameras, better optical performance, and much more expensive mounts. The latter can be done an order of magnitude more affordably.

But also, your eye and a digital camera see objects very differently. An astrophoto through the eyepiece, even a well executed one, will not match what your eye sees. Your eye has a higher dynamic range than a camera, but an inability to take long exposures. A sketch, even a simple cartoon sketch, can provide a more accurate record of what you saw.

A good astronomy log will also include a descriptive written record. This can help clarify what is seen in the sketch, especially as a beginner where the sketch may be simplified or cartoonish. Finding the right vocabulary to explain what you are seeing does take some time and it can help to read observing reports from other amateur astronomers.

The goal when producing an astronomical sketch is to record what you see without embellishment. Artistic skill is not crucial, these objects generally amount to dots and smudges. The important thing is to try to get proportions, shapes, and relative brightnesses roughly correct.

Sketching will also train your brain-eye-system to be better at observing. By hunting around for faint and subtle details to draw, you will find that you become better equipped to search for fainter and more difficult objects, and you will see more detail in them over time.

Years later, looking back on your observations, a log book provides a valuable keepsake and souvenir of your time at the eyepiece. This is an aspect I am only now, years after beginning my journey with astronomical sketching, beginning to appreciate.

It can be difficult to keep a detailed log when you are out at some dark sky site, where you want to rush through as many objects as possible to take advantage of the rare opportunity. Which is a shame, because that will mean years later you won't remember that occasion as well as the more mundane ones. In retrospect it might have been worth taking it slow and actually getting some decent sketches and notes, rather than rushing to get as many objects as I could. At the very least, make sure you record which objects you saw on a given night, even if you do not sketch them.

So how do you do it?

There's no real wrong way to do it as long as you're having fun, but here's some guidelines and the way I do it.

Get a log book. I recommend a plain white paper. Don't make the mistake I made at first and get stuck with lined or graph paper. The results will look much nicer on plain paper. You want to get a relatively smooth paper, something like the texture of printer paper. These days I use a 5.5"x8.5" Mixed Media sketchbook.

Alternatively you could print out observing log templates, hole punch them, and keep them in a binder. Personally I prefer the freedom of plain paper.

Get a pencil. Any decent No.2 will suffice. A pen will be very limiting and a mechanical pencil will be hard to get soft smudges.

Some people do white sketches on specialized black paper. But you have to go out of your way to find decent white pencils and pens. A crayola white pencil will not work. I just do black on white and digitally invert the sketches.

Get a red flashlight. White light will ruin your dark adaptation, red light goes a little easier on it. You don't want the light to be too bright though, it should be just bright enough to comfortably see by and no brighter. You can make a red flashlight by putting layers of red filter over a normal flashlight, or buy one with red LEDs. You can get tiny little keychain red lights for pretty cheap online. But my favorite for sketching is a red LED headlamp. Many of these also have white lights, but I solve this problem by covering the white light with red electrical tape.

Optional: Number each page in the book before you do anything. Just a little number in the corner. This can come in handy for indexing later on.

Record the date, time, and time zone at the top of the page.

Record the weather conditions. You'll want to know cloud cover, transparency, and seeing conditions. If the weather conditions change, write the time and describe how they change. An object may look very different in poor transparency versus clear transparency, and that may be important information later on.

Optionally: record the Bortle class of your location, or if you're real advanced, get an SQM reading. It's good to have an idea of what the light pollution level is.

Draw a field circle (i.e., a circle representing the field of view of the telescope.) The field circle is not the object itself. You can draw the circle using a compass, or perhaps by tracing one of the circular dust caps from your equipment. I sometimes go free-hand, but that won't look as nice.

The field circle should be relatively large--one of my mistakes in my early sketches was making the field circles tiny. A smaller field circle will allow more sketches per page and more room for notes, but imo it's worth it to go reasonably large. If you're using an eyepiece with a wider field of view, you can try to represent that with a larger field circle as well.

Record the telescope you're using (you'll want its aperture and maybe its focal length or focal ratio) and the eyepiece you're using. Magnification = (focal length of telescope / focal length of eyepiece). If you can, record the magnification as well. If you know the apparent field of view of the eyepiece, or what optical design it is, record that too.

Observe the object in the telescope. Take in as much detail as you can. If you're at a star party or observatory looking through someone else's telescope, you will have to get an impression very quickly. If you're observing on your own you can take your time to get it right and look back and forth between the object and your drawing.

Start by drawing the brightest or most notable stars in the field of view, trying your best to get their positions correct relative to the edge of the field circle. Unless your telescope tracks, the stars will move, and doing this first can help anchor the sketch to a single place.

It can help, when drawing stars, to find patterns of triangles and quadrilaterals, or perhaps apparently sweeping curves.

Optional: Note which direction the sky is moving (if your mount does not track). That direction is west. It can be useful to indicate that direction on the edge of the field circle, especially when describing the object (i.e., a galaxy that is "elongated east/west"). It's also useful to mark north on the field circle, which will be 90 degrees counterclockwise for newtonians or scopes with erecting prisms, or clockwise for refractors and cassegrains with star diagonals.

For a fuzzy or nebulous deep sky object, you can lightly lay down some graphite in the rough shape of the object, then use your finger to smudge it until it is the right shape and texture that you observe.

If you're looking at a star cluster which is grainy or glittery, you can sprinkle some pinpoints roughly randomly, but if you can see individual stars in a cluster, it's good to try your best to accurately represent their positions. (unless the cluster is so dense that this is effectively impossible).

For a planet, you can draw the object first to-scale inside the field circle with any moons or background stars, and then draw perhaps a slightly larger circle next to it to get more detail on the planet itself. Most of my planet sketches are blown up to 'larger than life' size to make sure I can represent all the detail I see, but I don't do that within the field circle.

With Deep Sky Objects, stars, etc, you want to draw a negative image version of what you see. But for planets and the Moon, it's better to draw a positive version.

Write a description. You can do this either before or after sketching, I usually do it afterwards or sometimes during. You want to be concise and descriptive, like writing alt text for an image. You can describe things that the drawing has already captured, but if there's any element that the drawing doesn't capture (i.e., what features were averted vision vs direct vision, or glitteriness, or whathaveyou) you should record that in your notes.

It can also be helpful to write a brief explanation of how you found the object, especially if it was your first time seeing it. This will usually be in the form of a "star hop."

If you discover an object naturally that you were not looking for, try to record as much info about its position as possible: what constellation it's in, what's nearby, what the finderscope view looked like, etc, so that you can identify it on a star chart or planetarium app later.

You also don't need a telescope to keep an astronomy log. A pair of binoculars can show you a lot when you're just starting out; they're very good for introducing you to the night sky. The one caveat is that making sketches is a lot harder with binoculars unless you have the binoculars stably mounted on a tripod. When doing binocular sketches you may have to take in an impression of an object all at once and then sketch from memory, especially if that object is not trivial to find.

Heck, especially if you live under a dark sky or you can regularly visit one, you can even keep an astronomy log of purely unaided eye observations. Things like, drawing constellations, sketching the milky way or naked eye DSOs like the Andromeda Galaxy or Pleiades, keeping track of the motion of the planets through the constellations, where the sun and moon sets or rises on the horizon, etc.