Clinton's Astronomy Adventures: NGC 6025

NGC 6025

I have had the idea of visually observing a target and then doing a sketch while my AP setup grabs some photons of the night's target.

So NGC 6025 will represent the first in the series. For now I aim to stick with open clusters then move on to Globular clusters and much later nebula.
This will be a nice way to hone most of my astronomy skills in one outing. Mostly it will help to improve on my current sketching technique which lacks practice and more practice and a whole bunch of refinement.

The drawback is that you need to decent night with a few hours to only observe one target initially, once that part of the session is done then I can hopefully also log a few more objects and enjoy the night skies.

When I first viewed NGC 6025 I was struck by what looked to my minds eye like a twisted piece of DNA strand. In my defense Messier saw a flock of wild geese which I still cannot fathom.
So I decided to take on this cluster as my first challenge in the series.

This was undertaken on the night of April 30th 2018 from approximately 22H00 onward.
there was a slight breeze(very light), seeing and transparency were good and improved as my target rose higher up and out of the worst of the light pollution. The light pollution always seems less toward zenith as opposed to the orange glow closer to the horizon and over the city.

I also need to be more aware of the camera angle when shooting so as to sketch in the same orientation. As you will see from the images below I have that wrong and I have had to "tilt" one image to get them in the same orientation.
there will probably be many more little lessons as I go and hopefully I will one day have a polished routine that will not take more than a few hours, fun filled hours!

So here are my visual observation notes on NGC 6025.

NGC 6025, Open cluster in Triangulum Australe, Mag +5.09

In my minds eye I see a twisted strand of DNA with two brighter stars toward the top left of view at magnitudes 7.1 and 8.1, these form the "head" with the other stars forming the twisted strand below and toward the right of them with a sprinkling of random stars around them.
I see at least 20 stars ranging in magnitude from 7.1 down to 11.4.
They are well detached and easily identifiable as a cluster with a not too strenuous star hop from Beta Trianguli Australis.

And now onto the sketch.

Initially I employed only the white pastel pencil, kept ultra sharp for plotting the stars onto the sketch pad(black sketch paper).
Once I had marked the stars positions with a light pin prick I then begin to "develop" the stars by making some bigger to show brightness and size.
Once this was done I tried something new. I used some colour by rubbing the white pencil tip gently onto a colour pastel block.

Then slowly and delicately I colour the stars to match my eyepiece views. I also added a few diffraction spikes(Thanks Alex!) to try add some life to the sketch.
Sadly when taking images of my sketch with a DSLR it loses some of the vibrancy and colour that stands out well when viewing the sketch itself, so the colour is not so evident in the images below.

NGC 6025 Sketch.

Now for the image.

This was taken through the Skywatcher 130PDS with a Canon 1200D(no mods).
These are 15 second exposures that have been given a very gentle stretch in processing so as to only highlight the stars from the cluster.
By stretching it further it brings out many more stars that the camera captures and the cluster becomes less apparent in a busy star field. Even in the image below there are hundreds more stars than I see visually!
I wanted to keep everything almost as you would expect to see in the eyepiece from light polluted skies like mine.