Learning to draw involves learning to see, so liberally sprinkling your astronomical notes with drawings of "how it was" is doubly rewarding.

This is "how it was" one night in the summer of 1994 when fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy-9 center-punched Jupiter time and time again. I started drawing Jupiter several months before the main event, and the difference in detail apparent at first and fiftieth glance was at least the difference between using a small, 3-inch refractor and using a sharp, 12-inch reflector. I mean to say that at the beginning of my planetary observing career, I could see no more through a 12-inch reflector than I later learned to see in a 3-inch refractor. Practice means as much as a lot of high-dollar glass does. Of course, what one can see in big glass during steady moments after all that practice can be literally overwhelming. It's hard to know where to begin to study and what to draw first when all that detail leaps forth. Are you new to planets and find that hard to believe? So did I.

The field notes on the left were made at the eyepiece of a 5-inch refractor and a 16-inch Dobsonian. The finished drawing on the right is a leisurely effort using Adobe PhotoShop and a graphics tablet. The comet scars got most of my attention: lots of fine detail begged to be recorded elsewhere on the planet and had to be ignored.

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