This site contains some astronomy sketches, created just for fun. More info coming soon.
Balazs Toth - baltth at gmail dot com
Latest
- 2025-08-25: 35 Piscium
- 2025-08-19: NGC 6633
- 2025-08-19: Messier 57
- 2025-08-19: Messier 27
- 2025-08-19: 61 Cygni
- 2025-08-18: Messier 34
- 2025-08-18: Alpha Ursae Minoris
- 2025-08-06: Saturn
- 2025-08-06: Theta Serpentis
- 2025-08-04: Eta Cassiopeiae
All observations
Index
Sketching
Being a low-tech guy, I enjoy using simple tools and methods and doing everything the analog way. I create sketches on a simple B5 sketchbook with pencil, scanned and inverted before publishing. Post processing is minimal, just a small adjustment on the brightness curve of the image.
When I’ve done my first sketch into a B5 sketchbook it was just a FOV circle on the top of the page. The template for the circle was a lid of a yoghurt container because it was the first thing I’ve found with the proper size. As I take observation notes to a different notebook, there was a lot of remaining space on the page. This gave me the idea to draw a second, incomplete FOV for one more sketch. I liked the result and I’ve stuck with this style.
By the way this was Messier 11, the second sketch is the same object with different magnification.
I use different colors during sketching.
- blue pen for FOV and sketch notes,
- red pencil for highlights in the FOV,
- graphite pencils for most of the sketch (2H-3B), and
- a series of color pencils for colored stars and nebulae.
I like the idea of drawing with inverted colors but it’s challenging
to find the matching color pencils, especially for yellow stars.
My current setup and the inverted result looks like
To make a colored star brighter I’ve also tried to put a little gray or black dot in the middle but it’s really hard to do well.
The code of lines and points identifies the color by its
approximate RGB spectrum. This is marked on the pencils to
be able to identify in the dark:
Note that
|||pencil is grey instead of white. For white color I trivially use the ordinary graphite pencils.
Inspiring links
I’d never started sketching without seeing the awesome work of others. Let’s name a few!
- Richard Orr’s Astronomy Drawings is my personal favorite. A huge amount of observations with interesting stories. So good that I’d buy a hard copy if it were available. Thank you, Richard!
- Deep-sky Watch by Michael Vlasov. Michael creates realistic and detailed drawings, it’s amazing.
- The Belt of Venus by Jeremy Perez. He also has fantastic articles about sketching techniques.
- The album of Carol L and the whole community on Cloudy Nights.
Site info
I’ve created this site mainly for personal use to organize my observations. I just wanted some simple static content with easy publishing that fits my workflow.
I decided to write markdown pages as I didn’t want to use any fancy web UI to edit and publish. Then I wrote a simple python program (astro-gen) to generate the site content based on YAML files containing the observation data. This helps to minimize time spent with editing.
Raw content of the YAML files are like
- name: NGC 6633 date: 2025-08-19 23:20 nelm: 4.5 ap: 127 mag: 48 fov: 1.1 img: ngc-6633-20250820.jpg text: | This sketch was a challenge. I've tried to interpret the proper relative brightness of the stars but the result lacks the real shine of the main ones.
I use Github Pages to host the site.
About me
Balázs Tóth – novice in astronomy – software architect – Hungarian – father of two – eastern catholic – playing the bass – fishing – happy if offline