Brent Hutto

Brent’s Moon Sketches

Unless otherwise noted, all of my Moon and Jupiter sketches are displayed with South at the top and East to the left. Since they were drawn with a mirror star diagonal, the original sketches were reversed left for right. After scanning them, I mirror-imaged each drawing with photo-editing software. Click on any of these thumbnails to see a larger JPEG image (some are as large as a quarter-megabyte).

Sketches Drawn using an 8″ SCT

One night after a full-moon observation of Mare Humboldtianum, I returned to the area to see what the advancing terminator had wrought. The libration was slightly different, too. The combination of libration and terminator had swallowed up the Mare but the lighting was really favorable for a look at the basin (unnamed, as far as I know) between Endymion and the western edge of the Mare. The top of this drawing isn’t directly south. It’s more like southwest.

I also scanned in the original sketch that I executed at the eyepiece in order to capture enough detail to work from in making the final, shaded sketch.

This was the first evening of serious lunar observing I did with my new SCT. The clouds were constant and thick enough that if I wasn’t trying out a new telescope, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. That would have been my loss. It was one of those nights where hazy, humid, cloudy weather was associated with amazingly steady seeing. At one point, I put my shortest eyepiece and my barlow lens in the telescope and wished I could have increased magnification even more. At the highest magnification I could achieve (580x) the 3-D effect looking down into one of the craters was breathtaking.

Note that in this drawing the large empty area below Schiller and on the right-hand (Western) half of the sketch was is shown empty and featureless. There actually were features visible there, the just didn’t make it into my sketch.

Sketches Drawn using a 60mm Refractor

Back in 1998, I made a few sketches using a little 60mm refractor on a shaky tripod and alt-az mount. Here are some of them along with links to the notes I included with them on the original version of this web page.

Grimaldi, Hevelius and Cavelerius around 8:40PM EDT on the evening of October 3, 1998. Click on the thumbnail image to see a larger version along with my original sketch notes. The top of this drawing is not quite true south.

At around 9:15PM EDT on October 2, 1998 with the terminator at approximately the same selenographic longitude as my sketch of “The Footprint” on August 4, I made this sketch of just Schikard.

Two versions of my sketch of Bailly (Rukl’s Section 71) as it appeared on August 5, 1998 (EDT). The left-hand drawing is the one drawn at the eyepiece. The other was done later and has an inset to show how the shadows inside Bailly changed during my relatively short observation. Click on one of the thumbnails to see a larger version along with my original sketch notes for that version. Note: Since one of these sketches has written annotations, they have not been mirror-reversed. These are just as they appeared through a refractor with a mirror star diagonal.

Here are several versions of a sketch of “The Footprint” formed by Schickard (Rukl’s Section 62), Nasmyth and Phocylides (Rukl’s Section 70) at a time when the terminator was just below their Southern walls around 9:20PM (EDT) on August 4, 1998. The interaction of the walls, the terminator and a series of small craters stretching to the East was amazingly intricate. The left-most sketch is the one I did at the eyepiece and from left to right you can see subsequent attempts to make sketches that matched my memory of what I saw. Click on one of the four thumbnails to see a larger version along with my original sketch notes for that version.