Sketching the Comet

I told you that I was unsuccessful in trying to photograph the comet last Wednesday.  But even though it was cold, I spent a fair amount of time just looking at the comet in the eyepiece, studying it carefully.  I have been learning how to "see" when observing astronomical objects, for years.  It is a skill that you develop over time.  You really get to carefully see an object when you make a pencil sketch of it.  I don't do a lot of sketching, but each time I do, I get better at it.  You get better at it by asking questions about it.  How bright is it, what shape is it, is it the same brightness all over, or is there there a bright center, and so on analyzing what you are looking at.  So I didn't draw the comet that night because it was so cold and windy.  I did the drawing from memory a couple of days ago.  I did the drawing on the left with an ordinary No. 2 pencil on drawing paper.  I also used something called a "blending tortillion."  It is a thing that looks like a short pencil, made from tightly wrapped heavy paper.  You use it so smear parts of the pencil drawing, to get really delicate tones. So the original drawing is on the left.  I photographed that drawing and then in Photoshop, "inverted" the tones, so that's what you see on the right, which more closely resembles what I saw in the eyepiece.  So now you have a sense of what this comet, named C2022 E3 ZTF, looks like.