Brent Hutto

Brent Hutto’s Moon and Planets

The main purpose of this page is to share My Moon Sketches, My Jupiter Sketches and My Mars Sketches with anyone who is interested in observing and/or sketching the Moon and bright planets. My sketching technique is crude but I hope it improves with practice. The process of making sketches helps me notice details that I might miss by just passively looking through the telescope, even when I don’t quite draw everything correctly. This photograph of the nearly-full Moon (larger JPEG image here) is a 35mm snapshot taken through my 8″ Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope (SCT). 

There is an active on-line community of amateur lunar and planetary observers. A good starting point is the Shallow Sky web site, of which my favorite portion is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Moon.

There is also a Shallow Sky Mailing List as well as A Mailing List for Astronomical Sketchers on E-groups. You can search through An Archive of Astronomy-Related Mailing Lists and find information contributed to dozens of lists by thousands of enthusiasts over the past few years. Unfortunately, lists hosted by E-Groups are not included in the archive.

Another link that you might find interesting is a review I wrote of the Celestar 8 Special Edition telescope. It outlines my reasons for buying the SCT, how I arrived at a particular model and my experience purchasing, setting up and learning to use it. The review might be of particular use to anyone thinking about buying a telescope with an RA drive to use for lunar and planetary observing and sketching.

For a more earthly pleasure, I have a photograph of a flower growing in the front yard of the house we used to live in.

Finally, I have a page with links to Some Poems that I find relevant to enjoying the night sky, if not astronomy per se.