After checking my images that were captured on the 23rd Jan 2016 it turns out I cropped out AR2487 from the image.
So I did a redo of the image and here it is.

Finally!

Some semi clear skies and some sunshine!
Dragged out the XT8 and did some solar viewing.
Also managed a few afocal images through the eyepiece with a point and shoot camera.

Not the very best images, I will need to find a decent second hand DSLR to get some class images.
So here is my meager offering for today.
This is AR 2488

Whirlpool Galaxy sketch.

With the weather still playing havoc and not allowing any visual scope work and a sketch or two I once again took to creating a sketch from a hubble image.

So here is my Whirpool galaxy sketch.
This was a combination of soft black and white pastel pencil on black sketch paper.
Total duration spent on this sketch was just more than two hours.
My photographs of the sketch do not do justice to the actual image on the page where it appears softer.
The camera really highlights the "white" in the sketch.

This was the best picture I took from about 20 attempts to photograph the sketch.

With the clouds still preventing me from any form of astronomy, solar or night astronomy I elected to do a colour sketch of the Trifid nebula to keep busy and to continue to practice my sketching techniques.
And here is the resulting image.

Done with colour soft pastels and pencils on black sketching paper.

A quick summary of my astronomy gear.
A Orion XT8 classic skyquest.
A Skywathcer Star travel 102 AZ synscan GOTO.
A Celestron 60AZ,
And a pair of binoculars, Garret Gemini 11X56LW.
Various eyepieces and such.
 And here is a pic of all the goodies.

This is the moon image that is featured as my background here.

It was taken during the day with my XT8.

This is a sketch of the Tarantula nebula.
Taken from a image and not the eyepiece.
Took me close to two hours for this piece using soft pastels on black sketching paper.

These are my first fledgling attempts at some solar imaging.
These are done with a point and shoot camera held up to the eyepiece hence the "soft" focus.
They were taken through my Skywatcher 102 synscan az goto.
They are images of AR2473
These were taken on 29th December 2015.

M101 sketch.

My very first try at a galaxy sketch.

This was done using a image of M101 to work from as I would never see this in my eyepiece at the scope due to my bad LP.

Enjoy!

GC Sketch using the Mellish technique.

This was my very first attempt at a globular cluster using the Mellish technique.
Hope you like it.