Many years ago, I used to do quite a bit of pencil sketching (Landscape, wildlife, sport, still-life etc...) - I don't usually like to blow my own trumpet, but even if self-praise is no praise at all...... I did used to be fairly handy with a pencil.
Anyways....
Since getting back into astronomy some years ago, I never really got round to sketching at the eyepiece much. Well - apart from a few 'quickie' attempts at some galaxies one freezing cold night, while out at a dark place.
And I'm definitely not an astrophotographer - I much prefer visual observing.
Over the few clear-ish nights we had leading up to last weekend, I tried out sketching a few clusters, and was surprised to find that cluster sketching seems a lot easier than galaxies.
Friday night (1st/2nd May) here started off particularly transparent, and after an hour or so of visual observing I swung across to m13, which was looking superb, so I decided to have a 'proper' go at sketching it.
An hour or so later - the sky was beginning to haze up a bit, and I was starting to go a bit bog-eyed from studying the same object for so long - but I had it down on paper.
Sat morning, I scanned the sketch - converted to 'greyscale' (because my old scanner introduces weird colour tints if the image has lines or dots close together) - flipped the image left/right (to counteract the mirror image you get from using an astronomy viewing 'diagonal') - then inverted to 'negative' to give a more natural-looking white-on-black image.
Then lastly, a final tweak of brightness & contrast to approximate the view in the eyepiece.
Celestron C8 SCT telescope - 13mm Hyperion eyepiece (155x magnification) for core detail - SkyWatcher 25mm plössl (80x) for a slightly wider view of field stars - and intermittent spells with, and without, a Neodymium (contrast boost) filter.
2B and 3B pencils, on standard A4 printer paper - PaintshopPro 8 for image manipulation.
I'm VERY happy with it - only wish I'd had a serious go at sketching clusters a lot sooner.
half-sized for the forum
Full size 1000x800 pixels
http://i44.tinypic.com/2lm9tna.jpg 
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