(About an Article I Wrote Called) Top 10 Deep Sky Objects for Astronomy Beginners

This is an article I wrote for Telescopic Watch that I'm genuinely proud of. Other than the inherent pointlessness of ranking Deep Sky Objects on a tiered list like this. If I could post it in full on my blog, I would. Instead, I'll have to link it here.

https://telescopicwatch.com/top-deep-sky-objects-for-beginners/ 

I would love to share my sketches in their final form on the blog, but I suspect that would cause problems. Instead I'll share the unedited version of three of my sketches. You can see how well they turned out in inverted form in the article linked above.

They look pretty good as black-on-white sketches, like what you'd find in my astronomy logs. But they look much better in white-on-black as edited, and the informative aspect on how to find these objects and what you'll see is not to be missed! Go read my article!

This was fun to do because I've never reproduced any of my notebook sketches before. I had to bring drawings from my graph paper log into a larger size and nicer paper. The star fields are probably all wrong in almost all of them--there's certainly conflicting stars in some of the sketches between the big telescope and little telescope drawings.

I made the sketches these drawings were based upon in suburban and suburban-rural-transition skies with one of four telescopes:

Apertura DT6, 6" f/8 Dobsonian Telescope, my primary observing instrument.

Celestron FirstScope 76, 3" f/4 Tabletop Dob, the cheapest telescope that is worth buying.

Orion SkyScanner 100, 4" f/4 Tabletop Dob, on loan from a friend, the natural step up from the FirstScope and highly recommendable as a beginner telescope.

Galileoscope, 2" f/10 Refractor, on a standard photo tripod, which is a lovely little telescope.

Because a pet peeve of mine is when links stop working in decades old astronomy blogs, I've taken the precaution of saving the article to the web archive, so you can find it here.