This sketch of the beauty of the Orion was born in poor conditions as at the time of the process an almost full moon was rising, that painted the background lightgray. The UHC filter helped a little to enhance the sight.

Shiny, large size open cluster with four brighter stars in the middle of it. It's not too dense, therefore it may not be easily detectable in the finderscope. For me the real essence of it are the high number of double stars, however not all of these are real binaries in real.

I've started a big enterprise when I decided to sketch these two open clusters: during the long process of drawing I've restarted from scratch once and decided to abandon at least 3 times. NGC 1807 was the easier case: a handful of bright 9-11m stars give the most of the cluster, which has a figure in the middle of the field theat resembles me of a flying kite. The really hard case is the NGC 1817, seen on the right side of the image. It also has brighter stars, however its real image is shaped by the many stars fainter than 12-13 magnitudes. During sketching many stars emerged by using averted vision which made it even harder, especially when after sketching a couple of dots on paper, and turning back to the eyepiece one tries to pick up the line. On the other hand this double-cluster is a beautiful and easy target, that should be observed with lower magnifications.

Despite its small size, this cluster can be found easily. When looking through the finderscope, it is sitting at the end of a very long path of bright stars. It consists only a small number of stars, yet the majority of these are quite bright with magnitudes somewhere between 7 and 11. Besides the 10 bright members, there are stars of at least the same number, within magnitudes 11 and 13.

First I wasn't even sure that I'm sketching the right object, this open cluster looked so insignificant to me for the first look, but after looking up images in a internet database about it, it became clear, that my time wasn't just wasted and I sketced the right thing. Around halfway between lambda and mu Per, a handful of stars, that can hardly be called bright, make up this cluster. On a magnification of 71x it looks as if there were two rings of stars that are bound to eachother. On 167x an almost regular hexagon is the most notable part of the cluster, made up of six stars of similar luminosity and colour, of magnitudes 12-13. Although not too spectacular, because of its easy location it might worth to search and take a look at it.

I've had the opportunity to look at this beautiful, dense open cluster on "moonless" nights. Then it seemed to have a quite diffuse background. This effect was missing now, although I've seen it as a fuzzy, foggy spot even through the finderscope, thanks to its relatively high gross luminosity of around 6.4m. Although it's a splendid view even in moonlight, its real character can be seen only on really dark nights.

This cluster is not too dense and not at all spectacular, for me its only charm was the northern star of the triangle made up of three bright stars with its nice red/orange colour. Its environs are moderately rich in stars, its boundaries are hardly noticeable, because it perfectly fades into its surroundings.

Interesting, large size open cluster with faint stars of variable magnitude: contains about 10 brighter and 20 much fainter stars. Nicely extrudes from its backround. Its cumulate size and brightness can be easily described if I say that even the finderscope shows this object as a small faint spot. The picture drawn by its stars reminds me of a horsefish.

A very spectacular little open cluster in the great Orion constellation. It has only a handful of stars, but they are very different in colour, with brightness in the 9m range. The most interesting part is the paralelogram in the middle. SQM reading: 21.0 m/arcsec², 9°C.

This galaxy shows an almond-shaped bright core and an ellipse-shaped body, with some brighter bulge around the core as its only special feature. The NELM was quickly getting worse because of the rising Moon, so I'm absolutely sure it would show a much larger size under a truely dark sky, but this time I estimate dimensions of only 2'x0.5'. SQM readings (just to give you an idea how much the Moon adds to light pollution): 19.95m/arcsec² (Moon slightly below the horizon) down to 19.58m/arcsec² (Moon slightly over the horizon) just within a 30 minute timeframe.

I was very fortunate that we had a clear night when this rare event occured, we had only a couple of such evenings this winter sofar. The 50% Moon was on the Southern side of the Pleiades. The star you may notice near the Moon was visible only for about 5-10 minutes, before it was covered by our little brother.