Who I am

Hello! I’m Peter and I’ve been an astronomy-buff for over thirty years. The first ten years of those I was a member of the Urania Royal Obervatory, near Antwerp, first as a member of the youth group, later as the head-tutor of the Deep-Sky department. Indeed, the “faint fuzzies” have always been my great passion, as you can tell from my drawings. From the early start I’ve made hundreds of them, also because my tutors encouraged us to make as many as we could because it’s one of the best ways to learn how to truly observe an object. It’s only when you spend a long time at the eyepiece, exploring every little detail, that your eyes adjust themselves properly and that you start to perceive those faint details which otherwise would remain hidden to you. But strangely enough I’ve only taken up drawing again very recently and now I’ve rediscovered the taste of it, it won’t let me go. So you may expect regular updates of my portfolio!

In 2010 my wife and I moved to the Emilian Apennines and for me it wasn’t just a question of dramatically changing my life, but also finding a reasonably unspoilt sky. Because in good old Flanders it’s become impossible to find a spot where the night’s sky is still an impressive sight. Many thousands of useless streetlights not only make the roads less secure, but also make life for us astronomists quite impossible. Here, in the Italian mountains at an altitude of almost 800m, however, the sky is still reasonably pure and observing under these conditions is a real joy. So in that respect I consider myself very fortunate.

In any case, I hope that my drawings show you how many beautiful things there are to see up there and perhaps even incite you to take up astronomy too. The advantage of these drawings is that they show you as well as possible what you can truly expect to see in a (fairly large) telescope, whereas most people whose only references are the incredible astronomy photos often remain disappointed when they only see a faint, greyish blob in stead of a spectacular nebula in thousands of colours. It’s a question of perspective. These photos have been made with many hours of exposure time and a lot of skill in rendering them perfect. Our eye can never compete with a camera, not even with a big telescope at our disposition. But once one realises this, the shear joy of seeing something with your own eyes, so “real” that you could almost touch it, makes the visual experience unsurpassable. Well, to me anyway. So please, enjoy my drawings and perhaps we’ll see each other here in Italy under a starry sky.

My Telescope

I started with a small 60mm refractor, which kept me happy for about twenty years. It was the perfect instrument to learn about the sky and I dare say that I used it up to its very limits. Then, as often happens, I got a severe stroke of what astronomers call “aperture fever”. The larger the lens or mirror of a telescope, the more you can see. And I wanted to see a lot more. So I bought an 8″ Schmidt-Cassegrain, the dream of my youth. But then I realised that what used the be the nec plus ultra of the amateur astronomer in the eighties, had since many years been surpassed by a new phenomenon: the Dobsonian telescope. Its concept is very simple: it’s a Newtonian (mirror) telescope made out of wood which lacks all of the electronic toys that all of the other modern telescopes have, such as an automatic object search and automatic tracking. But… the Dobsonian offers an aperture size which you could only dream of previously at a very affordable price.  I bought a 14,5″ Dobson and it felt like opening my eyes for the very first time. That’s how impressed I was… in the beginning. I hardly dare admit it, but I still wasn’t satisfied. So eventually I built my own 18″ Dobson.

This is most of the material I used. Doesn’t really look like a telescope, does it?

But slowly, putting the pieces together, the structure emerges.

This is the mirror box, with the mirror support cell in place. Behind the cell I’ve installed two large cooling fans because it’s vital to keep a telescope mirror at ambient temperature to avoid unnecessary turbulence. The larger the mirror, the more important this becomes.

A couple of layers of paint…

…and DONE!

Here’s a view of my treasure: the high-quality 18″ Galaxy Optics mirror. It’s the “eye” of the telescope and it’s capable of capturing about 5.300 times more light than the human eye. or in other words, with this mirror you can see objects in the sky which are 5.300 times fainter than what you can see with the naked eye. Because contrary to what is generally believed this is the main task of a telescope: capturing as much light as possible. Most people think that a telescope has to magnify as much as possible and that’s it. But that’s just a myth because a lot of objects are actually quite large and don’t require a lot of magnification at all. It’s just that they’re so faint that the naked eye can’t see them. Then again, the larger the optics, the more you can zoom in on the object before the image becomes too dim.

And finally…  the telescope in its new, Italian environment, proudly standing in front of the shed I specifically built for it:

After all of these years of observing, I got tired of doing it with one eye only. I find it tiresome having to close one eye all of the time and feel that it doesn’t let you see all there is to see. There are many binoviewers on the market, which allow you to observe with both eyes. But unfortunately most of them make you lose a lot of light and the image becomes a lot dimmer than with one-eyed viewing. Therefore I invested in the 2″ Siebert VP Echelon, which has an aperture unmatched by any other brand and for the first time I believe that there doesn’t have to be any penalty for wanting to observe with both eyes.

Drawing Astronomical Objects

In this article, I’ll explain some of the techniques I use to make my drawings. It’s a very slow process and for some of these drawings I spent no less than an hour behind the telescope. I try to make them as real as possible because the eventual goal is to show you what you can really expect to see through a (medium-large) telescope. I could easily copy some of these marvelous astronomy photographs or let my imagination go wild. But this is something I categorically refuse to do. When I don’t see it, I don’t draw it. Period. I’ve already received comments in the sense that you can see just as much in a 12″ telescope. Well, that may be and I’m glad for the person in question. What I draw is what I’ve seen with my eyes through my telescope and under my Italian sky. Obviously this makes astronomy drawings a very subjective business because no two persons or two skies are exactly alike. Anyway, I just do my best and hope that you like them.

The first thing I do is drawing a circle on a piece of paper which represents the field of view through the eyepieces. Then, with the pair of compasses, I draw 12 markings on the circle, on the positions of the numbers of a clock. These markings will be my references during the observation.

Then it’s time to go to the telescope and start observing. In the beginning, I used to draw the stars I saw zone per zone. But this isn’t a good method because in the end the proportions will be all wrong. So that’s where the reference markings come in. First, I draw a couple of stars, preferably brighter ones, which are really on the edge of the field of view. Not only will they serve as a reference for the field of view I’ll eventually draw, but they will also form the reference for all of the other stars. In this example I’ve drawn three reference stars, one at 11 ‘o clock, one at 4 ‘o clock and one at half past six. Then, I fill up the rest. In the example, there’s one star exactly in the middle between the first and second reference stars (red line “1″), however slightly to the right. Then there is a star on the line from the star we just drew to the 8 ‘o clock point (blue line “2″), at about one quarter from the edge on that line. From that star there is another one almost halfway on the line towards the first reference star (green line “3″). And so on. The continuous crosscheck with these imaginary lines results in a pretty coherent picture and the positions of the stars on the drawing will be fairly close to their real positions.

When the stars are finally all where they have to be, the fun part starts and I can let go all of my drawing passion. This also involves a lot of thumbwork in order to fade out the hard lines of the pencil and to give the nebula in this example a real fuzzy look; just as you would expect to see it in the telescope.

Quick back inside before my fingers are completely frozen. It’s now that the real work begins: elaborating the image with the computer. How much one elaborates a drawing is always a question of personal taste. Again, I try to create an image that reflects as much as possible what I’ve seen through the eyepiece so my elaboration process usually takes a lot longer than making the actual drawing. Anyway, I’ll tell you some of my little secrets. First of all, I never use the scanner but always make a picture of my drawing and enter that in the computer. The reason for this is that a scanner will create a very flat and uniform image, whereas with the camera you get a wide range of background shades, just like it is the case at the eyepiece. Please don’t draw too much attention to the blackish shades on the left of this example because those were caused by wrinkles in the paper which I had to photoshop away afterwards. But you can see that the picture evolves from darker in the upper-left corner to brighter in the lower-right corner. That’s exactly what I wanted to achieve. O, and before I forget to mention, the example image has already been inverted, meaning dark becomes light and light becomes dark. So a pencil drawing of a star on a white sheet of paper will result in a dark background with a bright little dot.

Then I create a new layer on which I will make the frame. I select a circle, invert the selection and fill that up with black. I also use some feathering in order to make the edges more blurry, just like you would expect from the real view too. This blurring will also give the effect that the edges of the field of view are slightly unsharp, which is again exactly how it’s like for the real thing.

Then it’s time to re-draw all of the stars. For this I create again a new layer and use the brush tool. Mind you, I mostly use a slightly greyish colour in stead of plain white for the stars because white is simply too “sharp” and less realistic.

One more important thing: I always use a “hardness” of 0 for drawing the stars. Again, this enhances realism because in this case the star will practically show its diffraction rings, exactly like it does in the telescope. On this example you see a star with “hardness” 0 on the left and one with “hardness” 100 on the right. Which one do you find most realistic?

Eventually I spend a lot of time enhancing the background, playing with contrast, brightness and even hue until I’m satisfied with the result. I also use the stamp/clone tool a lot to fade out places with too much contrast and use some blurring and the finger tool on the object itself. All of this of course to my personal taste. Another trick is to put large, faint discs behind the brightest stars in order to create the light dispersion effect of the eyepiece. Sometimes I even use the finger tool to wipe “spikes” out of this disc, which look like the diffraction spikes of my Newtonian telescope.

Astronomical holidays

My wife runs a wonderful B&B which offers a comfy bed and sumptuous breakfast to all astronomy lovers. So why not combine your passion for the stars with an unforgettable holiday in the Emilian Apennines? Imagine… a wonderful SQM21+ sky… an 18″ telescope at your disposal… and all this combined with a 5-star accomodation!

For more information and pictures, please visit the B&B La Stella website or the B&B La Stella Facebook page.

We’d be delighted to have you as our guest!